This article is featured in the 2025 Homecoming Special Issue.
Who decides what belonging means? This is one of the questions motivating the Hood Museum’s fall exhibition, “Visual Kinship,” which explores how photography shapes and disrupts the concept of family.
The show, on view from Aug. 30 to Nov. 29, features works from the Hood Museum’s collection, loans from the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and a site-specific installation by Berlin-based, Singaporean artist Sim Chi Yin.
“Visual Kinship” was co-curated by associate photography curator Alisa Swindell, English professor Kimberly Juanita Brown, University of Toronto professor of race, diaspora and visual justice Thy Phu and Mount Holyoke English professor Iyko Day.
Phu said that one of the exhibition’s goals was to expand upon traditional visions of family and kinship.
“What we want to do is not necessarily overcome or disregard the idea of family, but to open it up entirely," she said. “That’s all the more important in this era when there’s so much violence and divisiveness.”
The exhibition touches on the topics of war and state violence. Swindell discussed how these themes interact with the setting of the Hood.
“The museum is a place for us to have difficult conversations,” Swindell said. “It is a place for us to think broadly and to really allow many voices to have a place.”
Yin’s site-specific installation uses ten contemporary versions of 19th-century magic lantern slides to explore trans-generational memory and inheritance following colonial violence.
Phu explained the significance of examining these lanterns through the lens of British imperialism.
“A magic lantern is a form of visual education that the British Empire used to enforce a colonial vision and enable colonial citizens to understand who they were under the British Empire,” she said. “What [Sim Chi Yin] does is use this colonial image-making form to imagine a different, decolonial image making.”
The exhibition also contemplates the link between kinship and queerness. The photograph “Healing with My Brother, Nassim” by artist Coyote Park portrays two young transgender men, one of whom has just undergone a “top” surgery, removing his breasts. The two men demonstrate kinship by embracing and coming together as a chosen family.
Brown explained that the exhibit understands kinship as a multifaceted idea.
“I was interested in notions of kinship that were expansive and unique — complex and endearing,” she wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth.
The show considers three major frameworks to examine the relationship between photography and kinship: “relationality,” encompassing relationships beyond traditional blood ties; “formations of family,” analyzing how forces such as colonialism and migration shape and disrupt familial structures and “kinship and care,” exploring how tender acts can build and strengthen family relations.
That exhibition’s diversity of perspectives is the product of collaboration between a multidisciplinary group of co-curators, according to Swindell.
“Visual Kinship,” she said, is a “good example of ways for professors and curators to work together to have joint visions that come from different scholarly approaches.”
