On View
Lifeworld - Alumni Curatorial Project #12
Dec 13 – Feb 8, 2026
In phenomenology, the Lifeworld refers to the world as we live it- before language, interpretation, or abstraction. It is shaped by perception, movement, and the body’s ongoing negotiation with place, culture, and others. Within this framework, the body is not merely a biological object but the lived body: the conscious, subjective, inseparable unity of mind and body through which we encounter and make sense of the world.
In this exhibition, the body becomes the primary entry point into the Lifeworld, a living archive where personal, cultural, and historical memories reside. Even when unspoken, experience settles into the body through sensation, trauma, gesture, and habit, leaving both visible and invisible traces.
The works gathered here examine how the body, as both vessel and witness, translates memory into material presence. Through film, painting, ceramics, textiles, sculpture, and tactile media, artists explore how lived experience becomes embedded in form and surface. Migration, belonging, transformation, and renewal unfold through embodied perspectives, revealing the body as a site where meaning is continually formed and re-formed.
The exhibition is structured around three overlapping conceptual threads. First, the body as a site of personal and migratory memory: works reveal how displacement and life transitions alter our physical and emotional relationships to the body. Second, the body as tactile and experiential material: gesture, process, and touch become ways of accessing and recording embodied memory. Third, the body as a field of cultural and political meaning: personal histories intersect with broader structures that shape bodily experience.
Across these threads, the exhibition foregrounds surfaces, textures, and gestures that evoke the presence of lived experience. Visitors encounter the body- present, absent, or symbolically transformed- as a mediator of perception, emotion, and reflection. Lifeworld invites viewers into a space where memory is not only remembered but felt, revealing the body as a site of resilience and ongoing negotiation with culture, politics, and history.
-Hadis Karimi, 2025
