No Place Like Home

Domestic spaces and objects have increasingly emerged in modern and contemporary art practices. No Place Like Home, an experimental 2017 exhibition celebrating the centennial of Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Fountain, brought objects-turned-artworks into a mock home within the Israel Museum. Altering material, scale, and perspective, employing hybridization or fragmentation, the displayed works from the early 20th through the early 21st century provoked fresh responses to the familiar while raising questions about gender roles, family, memory, place, and displacement. The exhibition’s lively IKEA-inspired catalogue presents these works together with illuminating essays by architect Esther Sperber, who discusses the relationship between architecture and psychoanalysis; Cambridge art historian Alyce Mahon, who focuses on gender and domesticity; and exhibition curator Adina Kamien-Kazhdan, who explores notions of place, displacement, and itinerancy.