LONDON.- For this exhibition ‘home’ is imagined as a space for social, sexual and political agency, and the ‘domestic’ as a stage on which kinship and self are formed and transformed through acts of love, cruelty and indifference.
A group of works from the recent past and present has been gathered for 56 Artillery Lane alongside a weekly live programme. Visual vocabularies range from bodily waste and bacterial growth to intimate self-imaging. Sculptural forms make reference to temporary shelter and collective occupation, while films are diaristic, improvised and quasi-fictional. The archive is invoked as a ‘homemaking’ space. For instance, photographic ‘genomegrams’ by Fiona Clark describe a personal response to trauma, Ingrid Pollard’s film reflects on her parents' correspondence and Barbara T. Smith’s books comprise homemade Xerox impressions of the artist’s body and images of her children. Installations by Martine Syms and Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan work directly with the buildings’ fabric, while a film by Jenna Bliss – commissioned for the exhibition – explores the class, race and gender dynamics of drug use within domestic contexts in Puerto Rico and New York. Colonial legacies and indigenous activism are explored as well as gentrification and familial histories. The exhibition provides a partial map of the domestic as an unstable zone.
A publication has been made for the exhibition in which Amy Tobin builds a picture of a little-documented exhibition titled A Woman’s Place, made in 1974 by a group of artists in a squatted house and women’s centre in South London.
The live programme of performances, screenings, workshops and an off-site project extends the exhibition to include, amongst other concerns, co-housing, modular architecture, non-monogamy, the domestic in narrative film and fiction, living with illness and health activism.
Participants in 56 Artillery Lane include Chantal Akerman, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Soofiya Andry, Dr Meg-John Barker, Khairani Barokka, Phoebe Blatton, Rizvana Bradley, Jenna Bliss, Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan, Autumn Chacon, Adam Christensen, Fiona Clark, Lucy Clout, Fran Cottell, Phoebe Davies & Nandi Bhebhe, Jemma Desai, Fenixº, Alex Fleming, Keira Fox, Richard Fung, Harry Giles, Carry Gorney, Alice Hattrick, Candice Hopkins, Juliet Jacques, Alice Jones, Jacob V Joyce, Bhanu Kapil, Morag Keil & Georgie Nettell, Las Nietas de Nonó, Gail Lewis, Rudy Loewe, Suzy Mackie (See Red Women’s Workshop), Mira Mattar, Zinzi Minott, Merata Mita, Irenosen Okojie, Lucy Orta, Meera Osborne, Maria Pinińska-Bereś, Ingrid Pollard, Steve Reinke, Su Richardson, Christine Roche, RUSS, Sisters of Jam, Stanley Spencer, Barbara T. Smith, Martine Syms, Anna Szaflarski, Nina Wakeford, Kate Walker, Ed Webb-Ingall, Ria Wilson, Anicka Yi and Rehana Zaman.
The exhibition is curated by Amy Budd and Naomi Pearce, with input from Amy Ball, Gail Chester, Althea Greenan, Lucie Kinchin, Alexandra Kokoli, Imogen and Catriona Laing, Robert Leckie, Suzy Mackie, Sue Madden, Bernard G Mills, Ciara Moloney, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Su Richardson, Alex Sainsbury, Amy Tobin, Mercedes Vicente and Ed Webb-Ingall.
