‘Visual Kinship’ explores how pictures shapes the concept of household

This article is featured within the 2025 Homecoming Special Issue.

Who decides what belonging means? This is likely one of the questions motivating the Hood Museum’s fall exhibition, “Visual Kinship,” which explores how pictures shapes and disrupts the idea of household.

The present, on view from Aug. 30 to Nov. 29, options works from the Hood Museum’s assortment, loans from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and a site-specific set up by Berlin-based, Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin.

“Visual Kinship” was co-curated by affiliate pictures curator Alisa Swindell, English professor Kimberly Juanita Brown, University of Toronto professor of race, diaspora and visible justice Thy Phu and Mount Holyoke English professor Iyko Day. 

Phu stated that one of many exhibition’s targets was to increase upon conventional visions of household and kinship.

“What we want to do is not necessarily overcome or disregard the idea of family, but to open it up entirely,” she said. “That’s all the more important in this era when there’s so much violence and divisiveness.”

The exhibition touches on the matters of struggle and state violence. Swindell mentioned how these themes work together with the setting of the Hood.

“The museum is a place for us to have difficult conversations,” Swindell stated. “It is a place for us to think broadly and to really allow many voices to have a place.”

Yin’s site-specific set up makes use of ten up to date variations of Nineteenth-century magic lantern slides to discover trans-generational reminiscence and inheritance following colonial violence.

Phu defined the importance of analyzing these lanterns by means of the lens of British imperialism.

“A magic lantern is a form of visual education that the British Empire used to enforce a colonial vision and enable colonial citizens to understand who they were under the British Empire,” she stated. “What [Sim Chi Yin] does is use this colonial image-making form to imagine a different, decolonial image making.”

The exhibition additionally contemplates the hyperlink between kinship and queerness. The {photograph} “Healing with My Brother, Nassim” by artist Coyote Park portrays two younger transgender males, certainly one of whom has simply undergone a “top” surgical procedure, eradicating his breasts. The two males exhibit kinship by embracing and coming collectively as a selected household.

Brown defined that the exhibit understands kinship as a multifaceted concept. 

“I was interested in notions of kinship that were expansive and unique — complex and endearing,” she wrote in an announcement to The Dartmouth. 

The present considers three main frameworks to look at the connection between pictures and kinship: “relationality,” encompassing relationships past conventional blood ties; “formations of family,” analyzing how forces corresponding to colonialism and migration form and disrupt familial buildings and “kinship and care,” exploring how tender acts can construct and strengthen household relations.

That exhibition’s variety of views is the product of collaboration between a multidisciplinary group of co-curators, based on Swindell. 

“Visual Kinship,” she stated, is a “good example of ways for professors and curators to work together to have joint visions that come from different scholarly approaches.”