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Bibilography
11 March 2025 - On Homesick, Sarabande and Material Memory
A busy envening on 11 March, I also attended a panel discussion between artists and curator of the exhibition Homesick at Sarabande Foundation. The show gathered works by eleven women-identifying artists who explore shifting experiences of home, displacement and identity (Sarabande Foundation 2025). The curators describe home as something worn and carried rather than fixed, a sentiment that resonates deeply with Home is a dwelling path. Homesick dismantles what no longer fits in the home and offers a structural reassurance that home is not a single site, but a set of relations in motion. Queerness, nomadism, and posthuman perspectives were not exceptions in the show, but guiding forces. The exhibition helped me name the intuitive feeling I’ve been shaping, that home is unstable, negotiated, and co-authored.
Yijia Wu’s work stood out, not only for its visual composition but for the absurdity it embraced. In the panel, she spoke of objects as migration, and her Soap Tiles series (Wu 2023), consisting of white, translucent soaps, is arranged across a tiled grid and then ritually washed in a clear water tank. The act is absurdly simple: scrubbing homes until they vanish. Yet it lingers. The performance is not dramatic. It’s quiet. Repetitive. Intimate. What remains after rinsing is a residue that holds both presence and disappearance. It’s not nostalgia she offers through the process of shifting her artwork, but friction, which is a kind of tension between presence and detachment. I think about her question: Is grounding important, or just a myth we chase?
Wu described memory as what we forget, and her performances make that contradiction tactile. The soap tiles are literal objects of home, but they’re also metaphors for how domestic memory dissolves under time and migration. It’s not permanence but ritual that matters.