Lifelines features work by ICP's 2023 One-Year Certificate Program students in Creative Practices and in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism.
The exhibition is curated by Marina Chao, and was on view at ICP’s museum from Thursday, May 18 at 3 PM through Sunday, May 21.
About Lifelines
The last three years have been marked by rupture.
We endured unimaginable losses due to the cruelty of a pandemic and ongoing political violence.
We started breaking away from status-quo traditions that no longer serve us and challenging status-quo abuses we can no longer excuse.
And we lost ground in important human rights battles, bending progress painfully back on itself.
It's in this context that ICP students in the One-Year Certificate Program help us regain our sea legs.
They are rededicated to interrogating the things that tether, root, and bond.
Weaving narratives around ideas of lineage, intimacy, family, memory, loss, and separation—life's lines, made and broken across generations—they connect us.
And in times that have left so many of us feeling unmoored, photography and artmaking are crucial, shared lifelines.
Across the diverse bodies of work on view, there’s a distinct turn inward as the students look at what is closest to them.
Some focus on their family histories, intertwined with the political histories of their home countries or held within the walls and spaces of familial homes.
Some engage with their own feelings of displacement from being between cultures, being adopted, feeling homesick, or something more intangible.
Others seek out kindred communities—fellow immigrants, artists, ravers, and athletes.
There are also visual expressions of psychological states that feel isolating or might otherwise be indescribable.
These have been lonely, frustrating years.
They have also been happy ones, marked by homecomings and homemaking.
Now we’re together again, and as we spend time with the students' work in these galleries, we have the distinct, necessary pleasure of seeing, feeling, and reveling in the lifelines they draw among us.
—Marina Chao, Curator
