DIS-PLACED

Under the title ‘DIS-PLACED’, the Konschthal Esch is collaborating with the city of Esch-sur-Alzette as part of the Biennale 2024 – Architectures, d’Esch Capitale Culturelle. Divided in two parts, and taking place between July 2024 to January 2025, ‘DIS-PLACED’ will bring together the work of a dozen artists from Luxembourg and abroad reflecting on the notion of ‘loss of home’.

‘Home’ is often associated with a piece of architecture, a territory, or an environment, as well as feelings of safety, comfort, and familiarity. Every day, individuals or groups are forced to leave their home – their domicile, their usual place of residence, their community, and their country – under coercion or oppression. Armed conflict, persecution, violence, natural disasters, and other factors that make a place of origin unbearable or put people’s safety at risk can lead to exodus. Yet, ‘loss of home’ does not always lead to emigration: the renunciation of a given set of beliefs or nostalgia for an ideology can also create feelings of loss of identity, of a sense of belonging to a community, of a place that is one’s own.

• In July 2024, the first part of ‘DIS-PLACED’ will open, with works by the following artists specifically adapted to the public places and Konschthal Esch gallery spaces they are shown in: Taysir Batniji, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Haus-Rucker-Co, Hiwa K.

• In September 2024, the second part of ‘DIS-PLACED’ will take place on the lower levels of the Konschthal, featuring works by Taysir Batniji, Marco A. Castillo, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Haus-Rucker-Co, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Marlene Dumas, Omer Fast, Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian, Samira Hodaei, Candida Höfer, Hiwa K, Lisa Kohl, Gregor Schneider, The Blaze.

Hailing from Germany, Argentina, South Africa, Cuba, France, Georgia, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Palestine and Luxembourg, these artists deal with the concept of ‘home’ and its loss through autobiographical stories or personal accounts gathered from unhoused people. Somewhere between lived experience and interpretation, these images explore themes of abandonment, fleeing, persecution, exile, encounters, as well as memory and what comes after.