Dream Country, 2021 

Abenda Sohn’s “Dream Country,” hosted by the Brown Arts Institute, was a conceptual research project focused on the immigrant Liberian community in Rhode Island. Sohn investigated identity strategies, the theatre of memory, and modalities of representation that had long been prevalent in the United States. Through staged photography and biographical interviews with members of a recurring home fellowship, the artist examined the rituals of intimacy and the reconstitution of home in a distant land. Taking its title from Shannon Gibney’s 1999 novel about intergenerational inheritance, "Dream Country" presented Sohn as both a searching spirit and a close observer.