Not At Home
May 26-28, 2023
A Cross-disciplinary Collaborative Exhibition
of Drawing, Sculpture, and Moving Image Installation
The spices stored in the kitchen, the painting that hangs above the dinner table, the old tree planted years ago by one's grandparents—what do they tell us about one's home in times of turmoil? What must be hidden and what must be ornamentally displayed? What do these empty homes tell us about the ones who once lived there? This installation looks at the politics of a home left—of a home one hopes to return to.
Working within the boundaries set by the blueprint of a house—a garden, kitchen, living room, dining room, and a bedroom— six artists of various nationalities respond to the notions of exile, disappearance, censorship and surveillance in a multi-media installation within this constructed home. Each artist draws from their own socio-political conditions, memories, hopes and desires to create a tactile reimagination of a place we belong to.
Opening Reception: Friday, 26th May, 7pm to 10 pm
Exhibition open Saturday, 27th May, 12 pm - 8 pm and Sunday, 28th May, 12 pm - 8 pm
About the Artists:
Advik Beni is a South African born artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelors at the University of Cape Town and then graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Film Directing. Through the use of non-hierarchical, hybrid modes of filmmaking, he collectively creates imagined spaces for peoples on the fringes to express grief and trauma. His work aims to preserve a cultural tradition eclipsed by Western modes of storytelling.
He is the founder of the sadarts foundation, a non-profit which aims—through the arts—to increase accessibility and raise awareness for mental health issues within marginalised South African communities. His work has shown at San Sebastián International Film Festival, Uppsala International Short Film Festival, Encounters Film Festival, Joburg Fringe Art, Parallel Vienna, Untitled Art Miami, and the Edinburgh International Film Festival amongst others. He also received the Sundance Ignite Fellowship in 2022.
Gavati Wad is an artist from Pune, India. She is interested in questions of identity in contexts such as gender, the domestic environment and the nation-state. She primarily works with performance and self-portraiture on 16mm film, responding to tropes and standards present in commercial media practices, including those of the photo studio, television broadcasting, and political propaganda. Gavati is the co-founder of Artists in Revolution Collective (AIRC), dedicated to programming art and cinema from underrepresented communities across the world. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts with an MFA in Film/Video in 2022. Gavati is currently based in Los Angeles, California.
Luis Gutiérrez Arias makes films that explore notions of homeland and territory through human relationship to landscape, collective memory and myth making. His work has been shown at Sundance, DOK Leipzig, Full Frame, Images, Message to Man, Morelia, AFI Docs and Ambulante, among others. His short documentary, It’s Going to be Beautiful (2018), received an award for best cinematography at the Tacoma Film Festival and was curated by The Atlantic Select series. He is a 2019 DocsKingdom fellow, 2022 BAVC Mediamaker fellow, 2022 SFFILM Rainin Grantee and was part of the Berlinale Talents Guadalajara 2015. He is co-founder of Bahia Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in process, practice and curation. Works that he has collaborated on as a producer, cinematographer or editor have been selected by Viennale, Rotterdam, Venice Critics’ Week, Curtas Vila Do Conde, Lima Alterna and FICUNAM. His feature directorial debut Todo Lo Sólido has received support from the Sundance Institute, Sandbox Films, BAVC Media, UnionDocs and the Allan Sekula Social Documentary Fund.
Nehal Vyas is a film and video artist from India, currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores the idea of national identity through memory, personal history and inheritance. She is a recent graduate from California Institute of the Arts where she received her MFA in Film/Video.
She is a recipient of the Flaherty Fellowship (2022), the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Scholarship and the Lillian Disney Scholarship. Her works have shown at Camden International Film Festival, REDCAT (Los Angeles), 2220 Arts + Archive (Los Angeles), Automata (Los Angeles), Analogica (Italy) and Mumbai International Film Festival (India).
Together with her friend and artist, Gavati Wad, she runs the Artists in Revolution Collective, which focuses on developing a nuanced understanding of socio-political conditions across the globe through screenings and discussions in collaboration with fellow artists and filmmakers.
Zaina Bseiso is a filmmaker and curator working primarily in documentary and experimental cinema. Recently, she joined the programming team at the Points North Institute/Camden International Film Festival. She is also a 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability fellow. Her work has screened at Curtas Vila do Conde, Guanajuato, RIDM, DokLeipzig and Ajyal Film Festival, among others. She is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in practice and curation. She received her Master’s degree in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts. Her practice mainly traverses among Palestine, Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, and the US.
Xiao Zhang is an artist-filmmaker from China living in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Beijing Film Academy in 2020 and currently holds an MFA in Film/Video at CalArts. Her practice centers on personal poetics which derives from cross-generation memory and diaristic approaches. It continues by employing methods drawn from handcrafted celluloid film and expanded cinema. Her work often offers a complex fluctuation between material reality and subjective experience.