Welcome Home / Come Home - Exhibition at the Museum on the Seam

Nelly Agassi created this neon installation with her son, Emmanuel, in a large-scale version that is on permanent display at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, where Agassi and her family immigrated from Israel thirteen years ago. In its original location, in a long passageway leading to the passport checkpoints and reception hall, the minimalist sign, written in hesitant childlike handwriting, illuminates personal and collective experiences of distance, longing, and the ambivalence of being neither here nor there, while succinctly expressing the expectation and relief of coming home.

Nelly Agassi's neon piece regularly flashes, causing the letters 'Wel' to disappear and reappear, while the phrase 'Come Home' persists as a poignant plea for the return of the hostages. This expression signifies their absent presence in the collective imagination.

Commissioned by the Museum on the Seam following the events of October 7 and the ensuing war, Agassi created a smaller version of the work. Its present location and the timing of its exhibition lend the ghostly inscription flickering on the wall different meanings and contexts. Displayed in an uncanny space inside the museum – a former Palestinian home turned military post – the work is now seen from a perspective overwhelmed by sights of abandoned, burnt, and bombarded houses. Like a broken road sign, the work blinks alternately, with the letters ‘Wel’ appearing and vanishing and the words “come home” remaining like a wish or hope suspended in space. Echoing the ongoing traumatic presence of refugees, displaced persons, and evacuees for whom home has become a site of loss and catastrophe, above all the work seems to capture the twilight zone of the hostages. Suggesting a desperate, hopeful-demanding call for their release, it contains the consolation of those already home, while expressing their absent presence, from which there is no relief.