Unlocked / Reconnected (2020)

Reimagining Home: Art and Solidarity in the Wake of Crisis

The exhibition Unlocked / Reconnected is an initiative that brings together almost two hundred ‘houses for art’ throughout the Netherlands: Museums, Institutes for presentation, galleries, artists’ initiatives and corporate collections. The point departure for Unlocked / Reconnected is the idea of sollidairity, the will to reflect collectively on what home is. As an initiative Unlocked Reconnected stems from a sense that opening up the home, in the aftermath of the lockdown, will force us to reconsider our outlook on this. Unlocked / Reconnected underlines the importance of art and culture in this period of global crisis.

Kingsley Ogwara (Luxembourg/Nigeria) is fascinated by people and how they are defined by their relationship to the community in which they live. His colourful abstracts tend to take on the form of masses in which there is a lot to discover. Ogwara does not consider crowds of people as a threat to the individual, but rather a home, a warm, liberating blanket of solidarity, which allows different people from different backgrounds to be connected in their human values and needs. In the recent lock-down period, the physical mass suddenly posed a threat to the individual, but was in no time replaced by a warm blanket of online solidarity. From joint online Zoom concerts from individual living rooms, community aid groups via WhatApp, to the shared weekly applause for the people in the healthcare sector. Our individualistic society regained its sense of community and solidarity. Hopefully, solidarity and humanity will remain prominent values in the coming recovery period and the day will soon come when we will be able to celebrate life and culture en masse again.