About the Exhibition.

Aqux brings together the work of 23 Latinx artists to re-imagine our understanding of home and the ways it shapes our subjecthood. Most often associated with belonging, stability, and permanence, home is an origin—a set locale from which we develop and configure our sense of self. This idea of home, nurtured by fixity, assumes that who we are remains bound to specific places and circumstances even as we move beyond them. In this exhibition home is thought about differently. It is, as the late historian Mircea Eliade conceived, the center of the real—a moment forged from all the spaces and experiences we inhabit in the now. As these spaces and experiences evolve, we do too—suggesting that identity is always situational. 

This exhibition seeks to animate this perspective on home. Across five thematic axes: home as city, home as land, home as self, home as labor, and home as intimacy, the works included in the show navigate how the spaces and situations we inhabit contour how we identify more than any unifying origin. What emerges visually are contradicting representations of home that mirror the nuanced and varied relationships these artists have to their Latin American heritage. 

In recent years the search for an all-encompassing term to describe one of the largest growing demographics in America has placed the word Latinx at the center of charged debates. In this show the term is embraced not as an identity category that strives to taxonomize but rather—like the more malleable concept of home—as a process of self-identification that is contingent on a multiplicity of histories and conditions. As reflected by the varied practices of the artists in the exhibition, Aqux contemplates the impossibility of Latinx art as a settled genre and proposes that our efforts to understand the Latinx experience should be guided by the differences that orient how people live in the world. 

Download the Exhibition Sheet