BURLINGTON, VT.- The Fleming Museum of Art presents two new evocative exhibitions, UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage and Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine. In addition, the museum continues its work with The Fleming Reimagined from the previous year with a newly reinstalled Storytelling Salon and an all new space for the popular Learning Studio.

UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage seeks to humanize the word “refugee.” Created during the summer of 2017, this multimedia installation is the work of Syrianborn, New Haven CT artist and architect Mohamad Hafez and Iraqi-born writer and speaker Ahmed Badr.

For UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage Hafez sculpturally re-creates rooms, homes, buildings and landscapes that have suffered the ravages of war. Each is embedded with the voices and stories of real people — from Afghanistan, Congo, Syria, Iraq and Sudan — who have escaped those same rooms and buildings to build a new life in America. Their stories are collected and curated by Badr, who is in graduate school at Harvard University and is himself an Iraqi refugee.

By giving these voices a tangible platform, Badr and Hafez invite the spectator to reexamine the word “refugee” and view it through a multidimensional lens. These are not merely stories of violence and war. These are stories of triumph and resilience.

Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, an exhibition of Shanta Lee Gander’s photo series of the same name, has been six years in the making. The series started off as an initial idea and inquiry: Who or what is the Goddess when she is allowed to misbehave? Who is the Goddess when she is allowed to expand beyond bearer of life, nurturer, and all of the other boxes that we confine women to within our society?

Dark Goddess is a mix of ethnography, cultural anthropology, an exploration of the sacred feminine, and a co-creation with each of the individuals featured. Shanta Lee writes that beginning to share the work through exhibition has helped her to sharpen her sense of the purpose of exhibitions in general. “Bringing Dark Goddess to others has been an ongoing inquiry and invitation outside of my comfort zone,” she shared.

Dark Goddess inspires us to reconsider what has been meant by “the male gaze,” a term coined in 1975 by Laura Mulvey and an insight shared in the book Ways of
Seeing by John Berger. Does Dark Goddess challenge the underlying idea that all of the ways that we see are inherently male?

“While amazing breakthroughs at the time, I think that these theories are binary and within our current context, we must think of the ways that the camera and the ways that those who have previously not been seen can engage with this technology in ways to cause powerful shifts. As it relates to my work, I hope that it inspires more inquiry, questions about the other selves that are several layers beneath the surface of a society that categorizes and boxes,” writes the artist.

While Dark Goddess was previously shown at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester, VT in fall 2021, the exhibition has been curated specifically for the Fleming Museum with a twist. In this latest iteration of the work, Shanta Lee’s Dark Goddess will enter into a conversation with the Fleming Museum’s collection and archives in ways that explore the continuum of the sacred feminine through time.