Artists: Daphne Ahlers, Olga Balema, Camille Blatrix, Gina Fischli, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi, Marie Gyger, Lewis Hammond, Nora Kapfer, Tristan Lavoyer, Claudia Lemke, Dominic Michel, Sveta Mordovskaya, Ser Serpas
Exhibition title: A House is not a Home
Venue: Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
Date: September 21 – November 10, 2019
Photography: © Guillaume Baeriswyl / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Fri Art Kunsthalle, Fribourg
A new generation of artists invades the spaces of Fri Art for the first exhibition of artistic director Nicolas Brulhart. Through their works, the Swiss and international artists mix the public character of the exhibition and the private context of the home, emphasises the political dimension of space and questions the importance of the gaze in the construction of gender and identity.viewpoint in the construction of gender and identity.
The home, domesticity, the primal, art and crafts, nature, the archaic are all so many examples of otherness that our modernity has pushed to the margins in order to found its identity. This cultural foundation is based on certain conceptions of space, of which the house seems to be the ideal metaphor, whether on an intimate, architectural or geographical level. By mixing the public character of the exhibition and the private context of the home, A House is not a Home emphasises the political dimension of space and questions the importance of the gaze in the construction of gender and identity.
The works presented attack the link between architecture and subjectivity. They have in common a sense-based manner of deconstructing our relationships to space, whether this space be concrete, imaginary, lived or fantasised. Oscillating between sculpture and the image, evoking the décor or furniture of everyday life, this selection of artworks express the complex and often problematic relationship of the subject to the object.
The figure of the double, the other that we have inside ourselves, inhabits the works and structures the very form of the exhibition. Opening a mental space between future and past, the second part, entitled A Home Is Not A House, takes us through the looking glass to reveal a repressed present evolving out of this first exhibition.
