Doris Salcedo, 1550 Chairs Stacked Between Buildings, 2002 (book cover).
Book Launch: Claudette Lauzon
The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art
Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 7pm
Audain Gallery
Join us for the launch of Claudette Lauzon's book The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art (University of Toronto Press, 2017). Lauzon will read excerpts from the book and reflect on recent artworks that employ the figure of home as a strategy for mediating legacies and conditions of human suffering.
In a world where the notion of home can be more unsettling than it is comforting, artists are using this literal and figurative space to reframe human responses to traumatic experience. In The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art Lauzon embarks on a transnational analysis of contemporary artworks that challenge the assumption of home as a stable site of belonging. Addressing a range of artists including Mona Hatoum, Ursula Biemann, Doris Salcedo, and Emily Jacir, Lauzon posits that contemporary art offers a unique set of responses to questions of home and belonging in an increasingly unwelcome world. In their practices, the book suggests, home figures as a silent, incomplete, and unstable witness to the brutalities of history that nevertheless conveys an insistent desire to shelter human memory, however imperfectly.
Claudette Lauzon is the author of The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art (University of Toronto Press, 2017), and co-editor of two forthcoming books: Through Post-Atomic Eyes (with John O'Brian) and Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (with Karen Zaointz and Natalie Alvarez). Her current book project, Eyes in the Sky, examines cultures of surveillance and militarization through the lens of critical posthumanism. She is assistant professor of contemporary art history in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
