What’s Your Name When You’re at Home?
Curated by Sabrina Mandanici
February 23rd — April 19th, 2021 (Extended until April 26th, 2021)
Jenny Irene Miller, “Legs (self-portrait)”, 2020
Ahndraya Parlato, “Untitled”, from the series Who is Changed and Who is Dead, 2013-2020
Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present What’s Your Name When You’re at Home?, a group exhibition showcasing a selection of works by Marina Berio, Natacha Ebers, Mariceu Erthal, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Cemre Yeşil Gönenli, Ana Lucia Mariz, Jenny Irene Miller, Dina Oganova, Ahndraya Parlato, Sophie Schwartz, Maria Sturm, and Laura C. Vela.
Home is a feeling. It reveals itself as a sense of place or belonging. It has different connotations in different languages and is imbued with the histories and cultures we are part of – personal and familial, social and political. Home is something we can find or make, remember or recognize, lose or yearn for.
What’s Your Name When You’re at Home? brings together twelve artists – living and working in Argentina, Brazil, Georgia, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and the United States – and their personal responses to this question.
Individually, these artists adopt a wide range of artistic, emotional, and material approaches, which manifest themselves as representations of intimacy, tactility, embodiment, memory, fear, and loss. Through different forms of image-making that embrace and resist the two-dimensional surface of the photograph, their works probe questions of identity and perception, and explore relationships of inner landscapes and exterior environments, body and mind, longing and belonging. Among the reoccurring themes are the healing capacities of touch, and the complex, at times, conflicting, notions of woman- and mother-hood. Ahndraya Parlato inquires, “Are my contemporary fears different from the fears felt by mothers throughout history? How is motherhood itself a construction?” And Jenny Irene Miller asks: “What does it mean to be feminine? What does it mean to be masculine? Who gets to decide?” Taken together, these works punctuate photography’s ubiquitous presence with its power as a relational tool.
Organized in small groups to enable dialogues between artists, artworks, and themes, this exhibition departs from an understanding of home as a domestic space, and instead aims to create a space of shared experiences, where feelings and places, materials and concepts converse and co-exist.
Participating Artists:
Exhibition Programming:
Artist Interviews
Instagram Live Conversations
Zoom Conversation
Marina Berio & Ahndraya Parlato, moderated by Sabrina Mandanici. This talk was held Saturday, April 17, 2021, online, as a part of the exhibition What’s Your Name When You’re at Home?
About the curator:
Sabrina Mandanici is an art critic and writer. She holds an MA in Art History and Comparative Literature from the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz and an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from SVA. She was a Research Fellow of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, a Fulbright fellow, and a Museum Curators for Photography fellow of the Krupp Foundation. She has worked at Sprengel Museum Hannover, Museum Folkwang Essen, and The Walther Collection, among other institutions. She writes for Collector Daily and has contributed to Aperture, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, ao. Other publications include catalog essays on UMBO, Garry Winogrand, and Katharina Gaenssler.
All images courtesy the artists.