Autumn on the heart

Note from the curator of this show David Jablonowski:

"'Autumn on the Heart' is the name of a small journey through the studios of eight second-year participants of the De Ateliers program. I was honoured to be invited to bring together a selection of their works. It felt like travelling through a landscape of gestures and signs — searching for the subtle momentum, the quiet longing, that seems to move through their practices like a shared undercurrent. As I spoke with them, I sensed their wish to sometimes return to their native languages. English, the equalizing ground they rely on, often falls short of the textures that live within a mother tongue.

In German we say Heimweh, in Dutch heimwee. The translation homesick misses the true weight of it: not sickness, but ache, the soft melancholy of longing for a place that may be real or imagined. When I sat with Yingfei, she wrote the traditional Chinese characters for Heimweh on a sheet of paper. Re-translated, they unfolded like a quiet poem: home, autumn, on the heart. A season, a place, and an emotion resting on the chest."