Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging
At a time of imposed isolation, collective loss, and pervasive anxiety about the future, the thirteen artists in this exhibition draw attention to social relationships and reimagine complex notions of community and belonging. Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging is a group exhibition shaped by the unique conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Isolation and uncertainty determined the efforts of this geographically and ethnically diverse selection of individual artists to explore complex political histories, challenge modes of self-representation, excavate personal and family traumas, and mine the creative potential of loneliness.
This intense yearning for connection, kinship, and dialogue has reactivated the consolations of communal gatherings and collaboration. The informal pairings of artists here explores the artists’ shared preoccupations with complex and timely themes including violence and intergenerational trauma, race and self-representation, loss and erasure, immigration and border policing, constructions of gender and masculinity, and intimacy and the body. The artists draw from sources as diverse as their own family albums, government surveillance tools, and international archives of modern conflict – and they experiment with a wide range of innovative approaches and photographic practices. What is striking about this group of emerging artists is the diversity of their backgrounds and their wide-ranging responses to the social preoccupations that are central to photography today.
–Maya Benton, Curator
About the Artists
Photo by Alon Koppel