The objects and artworks exhibited coalesce around the question: What emerges out of a void? Encountering Absence creates living spaces for artists and viewers to reflect upon traumatic pasts and experiences in the present. Objects, in their brutal materiality, can be powerful conduits of memory in the absence of the people and places to which they are intimately associated. In each of the spaces in which the exhibition takes place, the objects exhibited tell the personal stories of alienation, emptiness, or dislocation which arise from the silence, often passed down over generations, surrounding unspeakable historical injustices. The artists we have invited to participate respond to these notions and explore diverse contexts of absences, silenced narratives, displacement and loss. We see these inherited pasts and traumas of absence as in a perpetual state of pending, hesitating between here and there, then and now. 

By encountering material and artistic expressions of absence and trauma, visitors are invited to contemplate what is missing through what has been made present. Personal objects, artworks, and narratives of traumatic heritage have traditionally been confined to personal collections or conventional heritage sites. Encountering Absence re-contextualizes these expressions of historical silences and absences within the context of a living space. By creating this intersection of private and collective spaces of conscience in the midst of daily life, we hope to foster new understandings which only arise from liminal spaces of transition. Split between spaces, grounded in the in-between, the exhibition addresses the complexities of traumatic heritage and (post)-remembering through a multimedia display approach which triggers all senses:

What do you hear in silence? What can your eyes make out in the dark? What do you imagine when trying to fill in the gaps? In the presence of absence, your mind wanders.