Protected: Toward Return (on Recovery)

Toward Return (on Recovery), is a single-channel screening and VR installation program curated by Jennifer Laiwint and Gladys Lou. Toward Return takes its title from the paradox of aspiring toward a state that once was. This program explores forms of rehabilitation—medical, cultural, personal, and ecological—while acknowledging the tensions and contradictions within these processes. What does it mean to recover from a deep wound? Can what is damaged or lost be repaired? How do we navigate hope and grief, distance and familiarity? Is it possible to return to a “normal state”? Featuring single-channel videos and a multimedia installation, the works position recovery as a shifting state between restoration, exhaustion, and reactivation. Together, they show the possibility of experimental media in facilitating recovery.