Invited Artist
“The World is a Handkerchief” is an international collaborative project of 50 artists, featuring a collection of handkerchiefs which explores notions of homeland, family, displacement, and identity.
June 30 – July 5, 2020
Bower Ashton Gallery
UWE- University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
March 17-21, 2020
Gallery 20 |20
Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
323 West 39th Street. New York City, USA
May 23- June 04, 2019
London Print Studio Gallery
425 Harrow Rd. London, UK
“Likewise, Alicia Candiani, in ‘Mundus’, shows that home is not material, it is not a defined territory, it is rather where you want to be, where your loved ones are, where you can make your life’s work. The work of an artist is itself an act of imagining, of dreaming, and dreaming is itself the condition of migrancy – it is the dream of a better life, or simply life itself, which spurs the migrant, the refugee, and the asylum seeker, to leave one version of home, hoping and yearning to find another. Home is sanctuary and opportunity.”
GIL SANDERS
The World is a Handkerchief A collaborative proposal rooted in a Spanish phrase (“el mundo es un pañuelo”) to express the sense that ‘this is such a small world’. In times of constant global displacements, often meaningful encounters coincide in the same place and time. This project aims to celebrate the extended family generated throughout decades of a moving art practice and education.
“Capturing wandering, often vanishing memories of homeland and reflections on displacement and identity, migrant visual narratives will settle in a soft welcoming ground to be shared, carried and treasured as a tangible memento.
CECILIA MANDRILE & CLAUDIA DE MONTE | artists/organizers
Handkerchiefs are portable, foldable, simple square of cotton that, able to hold memories and itinerant narratives, have translated during the last centuries, from epic commemorations to children storytelling. Containers of sadness, loss, hope, happiness and love, they accompany us in the journey, in celebrations and farewells; they protect our wounds, they sustain tears of joy or despair.
Willing to sustain a disappearing tradition, we have created an edition of 100 Handkerchiefs to be exchanged with participants interested in sharing their visual reflections or personal narratives on diverse notions of Home_land, family (or the lack of). Along this year, print workshops and exchanges will be held in several locations and contexts in Argentina, Jordan, England and the United States revisiting our common journey over the past quarter of century.
The growing handkerchiefs collection emerging from this project will be presented in each new venue that hosts the event, and continue as a traveling exhibition during 2020. Supported by an itinerant practice, this project will be documented and shared in Instagram (theworldisahandkerchief.)”
ALICIA CANDIANI 