NO WORD FOR HOME: R. K. Ní Crónaile Curatorial Diploma Exhibition opening

This exhibition brings together female artists from the Czech Republic and the Levant, moving between English, Czech, and Arabic to explore exile as both a bodily and linguistic experience, and how the feminine form becomes a site where translation, displacement, and public memory collide.

Women who have had to rebirth themselves in other people’s languages. Women who crossed borders and woke up in bodies that no longer quite made sense, too visible, not visible enough, too foreign, too intimate. Exile doesn’t just move you on a map. It rewrites your flesh, then asks you to behave as if you were born fluent.

The title fractures on purpose.

In English, No Word for Home stops short, like someone biting down on the rest of the
sentence.

In Czech, Chybí slovo pro domov admits there is a missing word for domov, for the slow, stubborn act of belonging.

In Arabic, لا كلمة للوطن، سوى العودة offers only return as a translation for homeland, a promise
that may remain conditional.

Between these three lies the territory the works inhabit: women trying to thread themselves through incompatible grammars, national, linguistic, gendered. In the process, pieces missing. A shoulder. A neck. The curve of a breast. The way desire sounded in one language and collapses in another. The feminine body becomes a text constantly revised by other people’s rules, redacted to be acceptable, desirable, employable, harmless.

Here, those edits are made visible, not as aesthetic effect, but as evidence. A filmed work
built from private correspondence does not “share” intimacy. It contaminates it. It subtitles it. It drags it under public light until tenderness begins to feel mediated, filtered, processed, as if coseness must pass through someone else’s terms. A portrait refuses the clean consumption of the subject; the gaze meets you like a locked door, and you are forced to notice your own insistence on entry. These works don’t romanticise exile and they don’t resolve it. They don’t soothe the viewer into empathy. They say: this is what it costs to be readable, and this is what happens when readability is demanded. And still, something slips through the gaps. A shared shiver. A familiar angle of the spine. The sense that, even in exile and misinterpretation, we recognise each other more than we are supposed to. The works sit in that charged space, uneasy, unexpectedly tender, where nothing translates cleanly, but meaning insists on arriving anyway.