Birgit Jürgenssen, Mattress Shoes 1973. Tate. Courtesy Alison Jacques, London and Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna, © Estate of Birgit Jürgenssen, Vienna.
8 rooms in Performer and Participant
Turning the gallery into an imaginary bedroom, six artists working from the 1970s to today reflect on our relationships with the home
They explore how domestic space can be a place of both comfort and confinement, where gender and family roles are performed and contested.
In her photographic series and sculpture, Birgit Jürgenssen examines the implications of living under a patriarchal society. Valérie Mréjen’s film echoes similar sentiments. Both artists explore how femininity is perceived and performed in domestic space.
In works by Mona Hatoum, Kiki Smith, Danh Võ and Heidi Bucher, we see the relationship between the home and the parental. Hatoum’s leaning infant’s cot rests in one corner alongside Smith’s Untitled (Pink Bosoms) and Bucher’s Untitled (Blouse). Together they invoke maternity and expose the invisibility of women’s labour.
Danh Võ’s works on paper comment on father-son relationships. Drawings of plants catalogued by a French missionary in Vietnam are repurposed by the artist to produce a decorative wallpaper. A letter transcribed by Võ’s father is fixed to the wall. His handwriting is just one indicator of French colonial legacies in Vietnam. The works uncover how intergenerational traumas can seep into the fabric of the home, unsettling our idea of the living space as a place of refuge.