Liminal Spaces: An Exhibition on the Edge of Transformation
“Liminal Spaces” invites audiences into a borderless world where identity, memory, environment, and body are constantly redefined. This group exhibition features artists from across the globe—Sudan, Afghanistan, Greece, India, Bulgaria, Germany, and more—bringing together a chorus of voices navigating thresholds: between war and peace, migration and homecoming, ecological collapse and renewal, silence and sound, violence and tenderness.
At its heart, the exhibition holds space for stories shaped in crisis, yet brimming with resilience. A forest—filmic and fragile—opens the path. Nearby, underwater photographs capture the unseen guardians of marine ecosystems: tiny, vital creatures who, like many of the artists, thrive in the overlooked. A longing for sun-drenched Italian coasts echoes through images tinted with nostalgia, while city lights—both a source of pollution and a guide for returning home—pulse with the contradictions of modern life.
From an Afghan artist’s portrait of his mother beneath the folds of a burka, to a Greek film retracing a grandmother’s feminist resistance in the 1960s, the exhibition weaves personal histories into the broader fabric of patriarchy, migration, and cultural memory. These pieces do not simply recall the past—they interrogate the present. A Sudanese photographer captures a wedding amidst the chaos of war, offering a tender meditation on joy, survival, and the fragility of celebration when life is under siege.
Women’s voices resonate deeply throughout the works: through poetry, painting, collage, and sculpture. One artist from India evokes the silence and warmth of home; another reimagines trauma as fantastical metamorphosis, making peace with chaos while questioning what justice looks like when it’s never served. A sculpture influenced by kintsugi—Japan’s art of golden repair—reminds us that even what is broken holds immeasurable worth.
Temporal thresholds unfold sonically and cinematically. A Bulgarian artist navigates the Ukrainian war frontlines with humor, fear, and ritual. A musical composition draws from the rhythms of a virtual streamer’s life, turning field recordings into meditative soundscapes. A music video satire unravels privilege, and a piano composition reflects on divinity and resonance.
Memory, movement, and displacement shape many of the exhibition’s works. An audiovisual installation documenting international students arriving in New York stands alongside raw photographs of the 125th Street subway station and poetic imagery from the Bronx Zoo in winter—a still haiku on death and impermanence. A train journey reminds us that meaning lies more in motion than in destination.
From documentary to fantasy, film to painting, Liminal Spaces holds space for transformation—not always redemptive, but always real. These works do not resolve the liminal; they dwell in it. They ask what it means to remain present in the in-between: to dream in the subway, to dance during shelling, to search for divine rhythm in everyday sound, to create while crossing borders—both literal and internal.
Photographs taken behind the scenes at the UN High-Level Political Forum and the General Assembly, captured on Portra 400 with on-camera flash, reproduce a sense of past grandeur—highlighting both the UN’s long existence and the urgent need for its reform.
From internal to external migration, from forest floors to subway platforms, the exhibition moves like breath. A guiding ink piece in Urdu reads “سفر” (Journey), again and again—reminding us that all transitions carry wisdom.
This notion of transition continues in works that explore family, identity, and collective memory. A portrait series invites visitors to “see eye-to-eye” with their neighbors through Polaroids and unretouched photography, encouraging empathy beyond difference. A documentary on hip-hop, graffiti, and dance scenes in Colombia becomes a celebration of collective expression amid erasure.
Environmental allegory reaches a climax in an installation of rootless trees made from processed materials, alongside a wooden sculpture of fish and a ticking clock—reminders of our dwindling time on a wounded planet.
The interplay between reality and imagination continues in a dreamy painting series titled The Dreamers. One piece, The Gambler, tells the story of a New York doorman who moonlights in Atlantic City, embodying the tension between routine and escapism.
Each piece in Liminal Spaces operates as a portal into someone’s memory, someone’s war, someone’s joy, someone’s journey. Standing on thresholds, they ask us not just to look—but to cross, and to be transformed. As borders dissolve and realities blur, this exhibition invites you to witness the tension between despair and beauty, presence and displacement, rupture and hope. In these liminal spaces, we do not find answers—but we do find each other.