‘HomeLessHome’ at Museum of the Seam features Hema Upadhyay

Renowned artist Hema Upadhyay features in an international collaborative exhibition ‘HomeLessHome’ at Museum of the Seam. The art institution located in Jerusalem features five artists, who investigate the relationship ‘between the private home and the state’.

A curatorial note to the thought-provoking show notes: “The home is seen as something ‘natural’, as a space dominated by needs, which are of no interest to the designed public space. Its interior is identified as a private, safe space, beyond the reach of legitimate intervention of the state. At the one end is the home that assumes the existence of an autonomous subject residing in it, separated from the public outside, and whose contours delineate the space into which the political (or the public existence) cannot invade.

“At the other end is the rejection of the individual's right to ‘domesticate’ the space or the expropriation of the citizens’ right to create a ‘homey’ sense of belonging, intimacy and identity defined by place.” The demolition of homes is an extreme expression of this tendency. The idea is to study the formal and functional similarity existing between the private home and the state.

They thoroughly investigate the uneasy relationship between the two spaces, the two spaces that enables the definition of both as ‘home’ (the national home), and the underlying difference between them, traditionally placing the latter in the political sphere and the former in the private (or natural) sphere.

The subtle or apparent difference is brought out in backdrop of the traditional placement of the home as the ‘other’ of the political - containing what has been removed from it - thus defining the contours of the political, it may not trespass. In essence, ‘HomeLessHome’ seeks to highlight those places where the distinction between the political and the private gets blurred.