What Remains

Chicago – The Museum of Contemporary Photography kicks off 2015 with two exhibitions, What Remains and You and Me, running concurrently Jan 26 – Mar 22, 2015. Both exhibitions are curated by Assistant Curator Allison Grant.

What Remains registers the profound connection between human identity and place through artworks made by artists who are physically dislocated from their home or community. In the exhibition, artists suture together environments that exist across expanses of space or time as they navigate the psychological impact of loss, nostalgia, or longing for a native place. Set against volatile political, economic, and natural forces of the late 20th and early 21st century, the exhibition explores feelings of displacement and loss that resonate with circumstances that have been found in contemporary life.

In partnership with the Goethe Institutes of Chicago and Sarajevo, the MoCP has commissioned German artist team Oliver Sieber and Katja Stuke to produce a new body of work titled You and Me. When the artists first visited Chicago in 2013 to work on a different project, Sieber and Stuke found that the city called forward memories of the Sieber family’s former housekeeper, Indira, a Bosnian-born immigrant who lived in Düsseldorf from 1992 to 1999 before moving to Chicago and subsequently falling out of touch. The artists were able to locate Indira on Facebook and they are now tracing her history as it intersects with issues of diaspora, home, social status, and the formation of identity, political protest, and family.