“Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter,” a new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is confronting one of the most pressing global emergencies: the current refugee crisis, presented in the views and perspectives of architects, designers, and artists.Global migration and displacement due to conflict and poverty are among the world’s most demanding challenges today, with UN data quoted by the exhibition makers suggesting that as many as 60 Million people are currently on the move worldwide fleeing wars, conflicts, or economic hardship. Mass migration on such a scale makes marks and leaves traces—geographically and physically, but also mentally, and it is these changes and their implications that are addressed in the exhibition. Rather than directly documenting the status quo in camps, the curatorial concept according to a text issued for the event is interested in questions such as how understandings of borders and shelters have changed during the ongoing crisis, and how refugee camps, once defined as temporary institutions, have become “a locus through which to examine how human rights intersect with and complicate the making of cities.”To this end, exhibits by architects, artists, and designers are convened in a mosaic of perspectives.  Video material from the Forensic Oceanography project by British  research agency Forensic Architecture, for example, meet architectural drawings in response to the border-barrier between Mexico and the United States by Teddy Cruz, Ronald Rael, and Virginia San Fratello; interviews with inhabitants of the infamous “jungle” camp near the French city of Calais by artist T. Shanaathan, or Tiffany Chung’s maps of refugee movement in Syria are presented alongside the jointly-designed IKEA Foundation-UNHCR-Better Shelter modular emergency structure; and works like Brendan Bannon’s project on the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya reflect on how refugee camps around the world can gradually transform  into structures that at times even attain de-facto (though not legal) city status—with all the social implications and challenges.Amidst a global debate that displays increasingly populist and nationalist tendencies on the one, and unbearable desperation on the other side, “Insecurities” aims at confronting the status quo from a range of perspectives, with the help  of creators whose work focuses on providing differenced insights and nuanced approaches to what remains an unsettling truth. “Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter” runs through January 22, 2017 at the Dunn Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Click here for more information. The show comes with a complementary website featuring essays and contributions by international scholars, artists, architects, and designers (more info here).  “Insecurities” is part of the “Citizens and Borders” series dedicated to a “critical perspective on histories of migration, territory, and displacement” (more info here). Read more