56 Artillery Lane

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 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.