Reflections

Strange encounters, mobility, evocative textures, cultural connections, stories, water, land, travel, discontinuity - the overriding sense of the <abstractions> exhibition and workshops was that they were a meditation on, and a reconfiguration of the concept of home and belonging. Home and groundedness are never unproblematic, never simply a refuge from the world beyond, but can be disconcerting and disorienting. In this way I viewed being involved in the exhibition as an experience of being unsettled, of myself reflecting on unhomeliness. For me this was partly because curation is a novel disciplinary detour but also because the artists' voices, their involvement in the workshops and their compelling works made it imperative for us all to intersect our work and ideas, but without a set itinerary. Being a curator or artist in <abstractions> was always a collective, mutual, shared event, but clearly not in a claustrophobic communal sense of agreement and consensus. Rather, the events were slightly anxious, uncertain moments which flowed with some lack of fluency, dislocation and apprehension. The result was an exhibition in which diverse visual vocabularies destabilised and questioned the very grounds of belonging beyond the terms I had imagined when we started out. We were all asked to bring down certain borders, to enter a world of flux. It felt simultaneously enthralling and disconcerting.

Mandy curated Savanhdary Vongpoothorn's works