Your houses hum our songs

The international exhibition, featuring works by artists from Poland, Japan, and Norway, explores the complex relationship between place and identity, as well as place and memory. It raises questions about the conditions and permanence of the connection to “one's place.” It tells the stories of people who inhabit or abandon “their” places—whether by necessity or choice—during periods of rapid change and transgression on an individual or societal scale. It is a story of a particular kind of migration, one more often directed inward rather than toward other lands, lands of plenty. It is also a project that deals with cultural dispossession and homelessness, which frequently accompany many forms of inward migration. 

The impulse for the series of exhibitions, held in Poland and Japan, came from a short video recording featured in an exhibition at the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, Hokkaido. The video shows an elderly woman in traditional dress, sitting in the dark and humming a simple story in a dispassionate voice. She sings about the destruction of her settlement by imperial troops, the deaths of her loved ones, the panic, horror, and overwhelming emptiness that indelibly marked the survivors. Her song, played on a loop, extends beyond the museum walls and seems to echo somewhere between the sinkholes in the forests of Hokkaido, among abandoned and newly built houses, through the ventilation ducts of government buildings, and faintly from an old radio. 

The artists involved in this project grapple with fundamental questions: What does it mean to lose the sense of belonging to a place or territory? Can one feel permanently alien in “one’s place” while still inhabiting it? In what circumstances does home “disappear” while remaining the only place one calls home? Contemporary forms of migration often transcend the boundaries of settlements and continents, sometimes arising from a radical redefinition of the concept of home—when the entire universe, in its boundlessness, becomes one’s home. Alongside the relationship with “one’s place,” this project also focuses on the place itself—a place that is emptying, abandoned by its inhabitants, and fading away. It is a place where all voices will soon fall silent, yet the quiet song of the old woman from Shiraoi will still linger.

Przemek Pintal

Exhibition participants: Marta Borgosz, Victoria Browne, Grzegorz Gajos, Oliver Hambsch, Łukasz Huculak, Aleksandra Janik, Piotr Kmita, Anna Kołodziejczyk, Monika Konieczna, Haruka Kudo, Jakub Leniart, Yukako Manabe, Kamil Moskowczenko, Tasuya Mukaiyama, Przemek Pintal, Wojciech Pukocz, Hiraku Suzuki, Daniela Tagowska, Honza Zamoyski.

Curators:
prof. Wojciech Pukocz
prof. Aleksandra Janik
ac. prof. Przemek Pintal

Organiser: The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design  in Wrocław, Poland