Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art

From property deeds to shipping containers to wearable shelters to virtual spaces: what does it mean to draw a spatial boundary? To be at home? In a world in which notions of place are constantly changing, Jennifer Johung looks at new constructions of staying in place—in contemporary site-specific art, digital media, portable architecture, and various other imaginable shelters and sites.

Replacing Home suggests that while “place” may no longer be a sustainable category, being in place and belonging at home are nonetheless possible. By emphasizing reusability rather than fixed constructions, art and architecture together propose various systems of replacing home in which sites can be revisited, material structures can be renewed, and dwellers can come back into contact over time. Bringing together a range of objects and events, Johung considers the structural replacements of home as evident in artistic analogies of the prehistoric hut, modular homes, transformable garments, and digitally networked sites.

In charting these intersections between contemporary art and architecture, Replacing Home introduces a new framework for reconceptualizing spatial situation; at the same time, it presents a new way to experience being and belonging within our globally expanded environments.

Jennifer Johung is assistant professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and director of the Art History Gallery.