Sunil Gupta | Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art | Harvard Art Museums

Hales is delighted to announce the inclusion of Sunil Gupta in the exhibition, Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art, in the Special Exhibitions Gallery at the Harvard Art Museums.

 

What does it mean to be displaced from culture and home? What are the historical contexts for understanding our contemporary moment? How does an artist’s work and process embody and engage the narratives of displacement and belonging? Crossing Lines, Constructing Home investigates two parallel ideas: national, political, and cultural conceptions of boundaries and borders; and the evolving hybrid spaces, identities, languages, and beliefs created by the movement of peoples.

 

While offering historical context and a consideration of the forces that commonly drive migration, such as political instability, natural disasters, and oppression linked to race, religion, culture, and class, the exhibition presents a more complicated narrative about immigration and displacement than the usual rhetoric that dominates the public sphere and polarizes debate. Crossing Lines unsettles accepted notions of what constitutes a boundary and of what characterizes the migrant or refugee experience—in part by exploring how culture can persist and be embraced despite displacement. Acknowledging passage as a space of both trauma and transformation, the exhibition opens up new ways of understanding the immigrant experience.

 

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Sunil Gupta

Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art 

Harvard Art Museums

32 Quincy Street 
Cambridge, MA 02138

September 10, 2019