January 11, 2018
Dan Halter at the Weatherspoon Art Museum
WHATIFTHEWORLD is please to announce that Dan Halter’s work is included in the exhibition Baggage Claims, which was first exhibited at the Orlando Museum of Art last year. The exhibition will now travel to its second location at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in North Carolina, where it will open on the 26th of January at 18h30.
Baggage transports and holds our belongings, and by implication our thoughts. As objects, trunks, suitcases, luggage, and crates suggest the extreme mobility of our global culture. As ideas, in this exhibition, they refer to the humanitarian and political concerns that instigate this mobility and that dominate national and international conversation and policy. The term baggage also carries a psychological meaning: things that encumber one’s freedom, progress, or development.
Baggage Claims presents its featured artworks through the lens of global mobility. This mobility is the result of political, economic, and natural and social conditions. It affects broad sectors of the population, through the benign commodification of hospitality (think Airbnb) to the horrific displacement of millions of immigrants and refugees as a result of crises occurring around the globe. Each work in the exhibition suggests multiple readings. On the one hand, each tells the story of individuals: their journeys, suffering and memories, their hopes for possibilities ahead.Simultaneously, they refer to the politics and policies that create and shape those individuals’ experiences: ethnic cleansing, contested borders, lack of social services, and environmental cataclysms. The works in the exhibition—some humorous, others eliciting heartbreak—address both personal experiences and global policies, as well as the consequences and catalysts of mobility.