Unanchored, Unaccented & Unbounded is a contemporary art exhibition curated by a collective of IESA students, presented in collaboration with the Agency of Artists in Exile. The themes of memory, exile, displacement, and transformation explore how identity is reconfigured through being unbounded by borders: geopolitical, cultural, and psychological.

Featuring four artists— through painting, textiles, video, installation, and sculpture— the exhibition brings together diverse practices that ascribe a metamorphosis of lived experiences of exile, hybridity, and a quest for attaining a sense of belonging. An immersive environment — the acknowledgment of classic literature, and by using augmented reality, sound, and media—invites visitors to enter a space of unbiased reflection and engagement with narratives of constant movement, and the inevitable self-transition.

The curatorial framework draws on Julia Kristeva’s understanding of exile as a psychological condition. In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva identifies the exile not merely as someone removed from homeland, but as one who carries internal foreignness; a cultural dissonance, a state shaped by the loss of the maternal space, language, and origin. “Exile”, in her words, establishes self-reinvention and critical distance, in which one is subjected to fluid and unfixed identities.
In parallel, the exhibition takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which linear notions of historical progress are rejected. Benjamin conceives memory as cartographies of fragmented, redemptive, and re-invented moments: a rupture of the present and as a drive for constant re-interpretation.

The works showcased in this exhibition reject coherent, monolithic narratives; instead, they offer non-linear, multilayered, and fluid histories that reflect the disarray of exile. These frameworks position identity through exile not only as an absence, but as a mere generative, and an everlasting cognitive state.

UNANCHORED, UNACCENTED & UNBOUNDED

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