Homelands is a yearlong research and exhibition series at Storefront for Art and Architecture that explores archives as active sites of power, preservation, and erasure. Engaging Ariella Azoulay’s understanding of archives as spaces shaped by those who control them, the series questions who owns the past, what is no longer spoken of, and who is excluded from the collective record. Through three exhibitions, a public program, an open call, a radio series, a publication, and a summit, the program features commissioned projects by Ars Atelie, Danielle Dean, Petrit Halilaj, Thandi Loewenson, Sertão Negro, Alison Nguyen and Sim Chi Yin. These projects activate film, architecture, and feminist historiography to reclaim erased narratives and reimagine spaces of historical violence. By positioning the archive as a dynamic and contested space, Homelands asks how collective memory can be reconstructed and how learning itself can serve as a form of resistance.

Ars Atelie is an interdisciplinary architecture and design studio based in Prishtina, Kosovo; Berlin; and Zurich. Founded in 2016 by Donika Luzhnica, Gresa Kastrati, Flake Zeneli, and Krenare Juniku—university colleagues with a shared vision—the studio is committed to exploring the intersection of architecture, research, and spatial practice. Their long-term collaborator, Lydra Hoxha, has been an integral part of this journey. With a practice rooted in social and cultural contexts, Ars Atelie engages in projects that span urban interventions, public installations, and sustainable architectural design. The studio’s work is driven by a strong research foundation, a commitment to environmentally friendly design practices, and a deep interest in the politics of space, memory, and identity.

Danielle A. Dean investigates the recursive loops between the circulation of ideas and the material reproduction of global capitalism. Operating across media and with a variety of collaborators and participants, her work examines the fault lines within this seemingly closed circuit. Dean received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Completed projects include new commissions for Mercer Union, Toronto (2024); a solo show at Tate Britain, London (2022): and Performa, New York (2021). Other recent solo shows include: Long Low Line, Times Square Arts, New York (2023); Bazar, ICA San Diego (2023); and True Red Ruin, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2018). She participated in the Whitney Biennial in New York (2022). Group exhibitions include: This Land, The Contemporary Austin (2023); Freedom of Movement, at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands (2019); The Centre Cannot Hold, Lafayette Anticipation, Paris (2018); and Made in LA, at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014). Dean’s works are held in these public collections: Umma; Wellcome Collection; Rollins Museum of Art; Arts Council Collection, London; Whitney Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum; the City of San Diego, CA; Kadist Art Foundation; Hammer Museum; CC Foundation; Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Petrit Halilaj understands exhibitions as a way to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. His work is bound with the recent history of his native country Kosovo and rooted in his biography. Working in a wide diversity of media, including installation, sculpture, drawing, text, and performance, Halilaj's practice is a playful and at times irreverent attempt to resist oppressive politics and social norms and celebrate all forms of connectedness and freedom. Recent solo exhibitions include the Giacometti Foundation, Paris; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; Tate St. Ives, UK; Palacio de Cristal, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; New Museum, New York; Fondazione Merz, Turin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others. Upcoming solo exhibitions include the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin. Halilaj lives and works between Germany, Kosovo and Italy.

Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilizes design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Loewenson engages in projects which provoke questions on the status quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, unions, artists, and architects towards acting on those provocations. Loewenson holds a PhD in architectural design from The Bartlett, University College London, through which she developed a form of architectural practice—weird and tender—to excavate and contest the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka. Loewenson is a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art. She is a cofounder of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE. She is also a contributor to EQUINET, the Regional Network on Equity in Health in East and Southern Africa, a cofounder of the Fiction, Feeling, Frame research collective at the Royal College of Art, and a cocurator, with Huda Tayob and Suzi Hall, of the open-access curriculum project Race, Space & Architecture.

Alison Nguyen is a visual artist and filmmaker working across video, installation, and sculpture. Through approaches of speculative fiction, research, and embodied performance, she combines the particulars of personal experience with broader inquiries into forces of history. Moving image is the nucleus of Nguyen’s expansive practice; she sees video as a way of proposing different ways of existing within time and narrative. Nguyen’s work has been presented at The Museum of Modern Art; MIT List Center for Visual Arts; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea; Vienna Secession; The Everson Museum; e-flux; The International Studio & Curatorial Program; KAJE; Murmurs LA; Art Basel Hong Kong Encounters; Frieze Seoul Film; Ann Arbor Film Festival; International Film Festival Oberhausen; CPH:DOX; and Channels Festival International Biennial of Video Art, among others. Alison Nguyen received her MFA in visual art from Columbia University and her bachelor of arts in literary arts from Brown University. She was a 2023–24 Studio Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Sertão Negro is a community project founded in 2021 by Brazilian artist Dalton Paula and cinema researcher Ceiça Ferreira in Goiânia, Brazil. Rooted in Black cultural traditions and collective care, it brings together an art school and artist studios, an artist residency, shared kitchens, and vegetable and medicinal gardens. It is also the starting point of the housing project Jatobá Nascente, which was founded by six artists with the support of Sertão Negro to reimagine ways of living together by caring for the land and each other through mutual aid. Sertão Negro was created as a space where Black artists and communities can thrive and highlights the importance of art, housing, and food security as the foundation of an equitable life.

Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice uses artistic and archival interventions to contest and complicate historiographies and colonial narratives. She works across photography, film, installation, performance, and bookmaking. She was an artist fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program (2022–23) and holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. Recent exhibitions include: 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2024); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023); Barbican Centre, London (2023); Camera Austria, Graz (2024); Harvard Art Museums, Boston, USA (2021); Les Rencontres d’Arles, France (2021); Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017), Datsuijo Tokyo (2024); Arko Art Centre, Seoul (2016); Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); and Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019). She has also participated in the Istanbul Biennale (2017, 2022) and the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021). In August 2024, she premiered a theatre performance on her project One Day We'll Understand, on her family history and the anticolonial war in what was British Malaya. The performance toured to the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts in Melbourne in February 2025. Yin is based in Berlin.

José Esparza Chong Cuy is a curator, writer, and architect. He is the executive director and chief curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. From 2019–25 he was also a part of the curatorial council of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. Prior to arriving at Storefront in 2018, he was associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museo Jumex in Mexico City. Between 2007–12 he lived in New York and held positions as curatorial associate at Storefront, research fellow at the New Museum, and contributing editor at Domus magazine. In 2013, he was cocurator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. In addition to organizing exhibitions at the institutions he’s been affiliated with, Esparza Chong Cuy has curated shows in Mexico at the Museo Palacio de Bellas Artes, Museo Tamayo, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, as well as in Brazil at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and in Spain at La Casa Encendida and Collegium. José is a graduate of Columbia University’s master’s of science in critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices in architecture.

Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa is a curator, editor, and researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of space, care, and power. He serves as deputy director and curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Ruiz de Teresa operates across disciplinary boundaries to interrogate the way in which art, design, and politics shape each other. He coleads the seminar and research project on Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure at The Cooper Union’s School of Architecture. Trained as an architect and urbanist at the Architectural Association and Universidad Iberoamericana, he graduated from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design with a master’s in design studies and was a Stavros Niarchos Foundation PhD scholar, visiting lecturer, and researcher at the Royal College of Art in London.

Jessica Kwok is a curator and researcher based in New York. She serves as associate curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Her research and curatorial practice uses feminist perspectives to fracture governing frameworks in relation to cultural production, labor and performance, with a focus on solidarities within the Global South and their diasporas. Jessica founded and directed domesti.city, a project space in Lower Manhattan that ran from 2018–20. Her writing has appeared in various arts and culture publications. She is a graduate of The New School’s School of Constructed Environments where she received a master’s in architecture.

Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the changing landscape of the city for over forty years and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life.