Since September, the Johnson Museum of Art has been hosting a remarkable exhibit entitled “How the Light Gets In.” Organized by Andre Inselman, curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum, the exhibition features work by fifty-eight artists from twenty-nine different countries. It is an expansive show, stretching over three floors of the museum, that focuses on the impact that political boundaries have on both the world and the people living in it. More specifically, the majority of works on display explore emotionally-charged questions of displacement, migration, and exile. They do so in a way that moves beyond the news headlines and personalizes the pain and suffering that people impacted by division feel. At the same time, the art is intended to restore dignity to those who have been cast away by divided spaces and forced to live in uncertain mobility. Given how large the exhibit is, it’s impossible to discuss all the works within it. However, three pieces deserve particular mention.
On the ground floor of the Johnson is Amerika by architect Jorge Méndez Blake. Blake was deeply impressed by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, which centers around the unfortunate story of a young man named Karl, who was forced to migrate to the United States as a punishment from his parents. Determined to create an equally foreboding sculpture, Blake built a 31-foot-long brick wall, with the novel wedged in the bottom center. The book’s awkward height creates noticeable gaps between the bricks above; Blake sees the book and the gaps it makes as a way to look through walls, both physical and cultural, which divide America from other places around the world.
The entire first floor of the exhibition is reserved for the massive, three-screened cinematic art piece Vertigo Sea by John Akomfrah. To see it, viewers enter a massive dark room, only lit by the three landscape screens, each one projecting a collage of images and sounds. The beauty and the horror of the ocean is its subject. Akomfrah uses both films of his own and archival footage in an effort to convey to the viewer both the promise and danger that exists within the world’s oceans. For example, he integrates quotes from Moby Dick (1851) and Whale Nation (1988) with violent scenes of whale hunting. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that he is intent on contrasting peaceful scenes of waves and wildlife with those of man-made political violence and environmental destruction. The work then forces us to grapple with how man has impacted the world’s oceans and to feel sorrow for the harm mankind has caused to both the sea and to ourselves. It is a brutal yet beautiful work of art.
On the second floor of the museum is Mohamad Hafez’s Baggage Series 4. The artist came to America from Syria in 2003 to study architecture but was unable to return to his home country due to the 2011 Syrian Civil War. Hafez created miniature buildings in order to overcome his homesickness. He constructed the buildings as ruins: lifeless skeletons of their former selves, just like the cities that were devastated by the conflict. This one, in particular, was placed in a suitcase, redirecting emotion of the sculpture from the people in Syria during the civil war to those who had to flee. It shows the trauma that followed the immigrants everywhere they went.
The whole exhibit, from top to bottom, has stories. Stories about those who have to live with the trauma they went through, and the trauma from how others perceive them. These art pieces embrace those who have been displaced, exiled, and lost with open arms by showing viewers how they feel, not who they are or where they came from. They show that the future may be grim for everyone. But from those imperfections, from those cracks in society, the light can still break through, and the future may not be as dark as it sometimes appears to be.
“How the Light Gets In” will be on display at the Johnson Art Museum on the Cornell University campus in Ithaca, New York, until December 9, 2019.