Growing up reading books and gothic stories by Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, and Edgar Allan Poe, and looking at illustrations by Edward Gorey, I imagined and created a separate world. Every human has three kinds of worlds: one that’s inside, and a second that is the external, physical world. And the third, which each human creates and can’t live without. This third world is a sequence of stories, some of which are real and the rest of which our mind constantly weaves inside and out. I have been in the most prolonged struggle to find this third world for myself, which feels safe, as a place of refuge and an escape from the harsh realities of what is happening in the world. This prompted me to question how people worldwide create this space for themselves and what it means for each individual. This space does not have to necessarily be limited to an open field, a park, a corner of a room, a balcony, or any physical space, and it can be a psychological space.

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Safe space. It’s become a commonplace term that is used in both architecture and conversation in the culture at large. People are clamoring for enclosure and protection, implying that these things, generally speaking, are in short supply.

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The exhibition explores the tension and duality between the physical and psychological roles that forge the foundations for locations of refuge and comfort— rather than solely focusing on a specific place— with the idea that the creation of a safe space could be as simple as a group of people with shared ideas coming together.

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The exhibition has a variety of symbolic components and storylines with social and occasional political resonances. The human body, its dimensions, the places it inhabits, the narratives that enclose it, and the theater or public and private spectacle that takes place around it serves as the starting point for many of the artworks included in this exhibition.

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Your Head Is a Houseboat aims to invoke visceral reactions within the body and highlights unconventional or other- wise strange relationships and interactions between humans and objects. In the spectrum of the uncanny, each work finds itself both above and below the scale of human likeness, causing perverse familiarity and cognitive dissonance. A dustpan and sweeping brush with human fingers, a stool topped with a bulbous textile structure, isolated Pinocchios, a ceramic human head, and more can be found in the contours of the space that is delineated in Your Head is a Houseboat.

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The exhibition’s mood swings from playfulness and humor to caring and warmth to discomfort, tragicomedy, and melancholy. Private enclosure versus public space, shelter and sanctuary, agoraphobia and claustrophobia are some of the social topics embodied by the works in the exhibition. They muddle into psychological themes of vulnerability, danger, fragility, loneliness, suffocation, and safety.

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The artworks in Your Head Is a Houseboat were selected to elicit a variety of emotions, from glum to ecstatic, depending on one’s state of mind and each individual’s internal history. To encounter its contorted sculptures, installations, and digital works is to bewilder thinking about how wincingly familiar they all feel. Perhaps that was one of us one morning amid this relentless year. We’ve been encased in overwhelming cruelty and stretched this way and that. Let’s take some cues from these works: life demands a bit of contortion, which is to say, a little imagination.