Art Basel Hong Kong 2022: Where the Heart Is

 

Titled Where the Heart Is, Ora-Ora investigates the passions, yearnings and delusions which keep us creatively nourished. What are the heartening lies we tell ourselves, the unrequited hopes we cherish and the fervent promises we make to others? For many, our deepest craving is for the refuge of home, a utopia of understanding, security and warmth. For some, home is a place of family, for others it is a nostalgic call to a half-remembered sanctuary we carry in our hearts. Perhaps, the construct of home is where reality meets fiction, a tangle of joy and self-deception. There’s no harm in fantasy and new, self-constructed realities. In the times we have all recently lived through, our illusions, daydreams and fictions helped carry us through. All of us became artists of the subconscious.

 

Partly inspired by a quotation from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1790 play “Torquato Tasso”: “So klammert sich der Schiffer endlich noch, Am Felsen fest…” (“Finally the sailor may cling to the rock”), the show calls to mind how communities and families may reconcile and cling together in adversity, and how their desires and hopes hurtle forward in unison. These communal daydreams are often unspoken and little understood; but they exist. Rejecting prevailing premonitions of increased societal estrangement and alienation, Where the Heart Is nurtures connections and shared aspirations, seeking optimism, salvation and the embrace of a common ground.