Finissage with accompanying programme
Uncertain Domesticities & Viscera Domus

We warmly invite you to the closing event of the exhibitions Uncertain Domesticities and Viscera Domus, which will take place on Sunday, August 10th from 5pm at the House of Arts on Malinovského Square. The programme will include a presentation of Johanna Brummack’s installation ObsCare, a performance by Jan Jirák and Susanne Lorenz, and exhibition talks with the artists and curators.

PROGRAMME

17:00 Exhibition talk on Viscera Domus with the artists Michal Palaščák and Helena Lukášová and curator Rostislav Koryčánek.

18:00 Presentation by Johanna Brummack
Johanna Brummack is a non-binary German artist based in Berlin. Their work explores how biological, psychological, and social forces intertwine to shape processes of becoming, learning, and unlearning. Through video, sound, ceramics, painting, text, and textiles, Brummack creates spaces for encounter – spaces that invite attention, care, and imagination. In this presentation, Brummack will draw on their sound installation ObsCare (2020), featuring photographs and short excerpts from thirteen sound pieces, and will introduce their ongoing artistic research on the politics of care.

19:00 Exhibition talk on Uncertain Domesticities with curator Ina Bierstedt in dialogue with the artists.

19:45 Performance by Jan Jirák in collaboration with Susanne Lorenz: an attempt to maintain balance on the artist’s balancing platforms, which are part of the exhibition (Host: Domov / Guest: Home, 2019, and MYJÁ / WEME, 2019, with silkscreen prints from the same year).

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS

UNCERTAIN DOMESTICITIES
Concept: Alba D'Urbano and Ina Bierstedt
The international exhibition Uncertain Domesticities is a collaboration between the House of Arts Brno, the Berlin-based gallery Haus Kunst Mitte and the Berliner Asyl der Kunst Stiftung Foundation. Two of these institutions have the word "house" in their names, and the diversity of images and meanings of "house" and "housing" in contemporary art has become one of the cornerstones of this project. It was initiated by the Italian curator and multimedia artist Alba D'Urbano and the German painter and curator Ina Bierstedt. The exhibition was first presented in January this year in Berlin, is now on view in Brno and will be held in 2026 at the Museo Bilotti in Rome.

The exhibition presents works by a total of 27 artists, mostly living in Germany and the Czech Republic. It offers a variety of artistic media, from sculptures, installations, objects and paintings to videos and photographs. What is also remarkable, however, is the wide range of content that this universal, age-old theme currently brings. In Berlin, the exhibition concept responded to the character of Haus Kunst Mitte, a former apartment building. In Brno, it works with the generous and aesthetically strong space of the House of Arts and the history of the local architecture. In the exhibition we encounter works that thematise domesticity and uncertainty, and also the intimate sphere of human body as a quasi-home for the soul is represented.

The exhibition refers to Franz Xavier Baier's thesis of "living space", an extended concept of architecture that includes events and processes that inscribe themselves as traces in matter. The concept is also based on Gaston Bachelard's text The Poetics of Space, which expresses the author's assumption that the feeling of "home" is not necessarily linked to a specific object, environment or place to spend the night, but rather to an emotional attachment to a place or cultural space.

Another important source of inspiration for Uncertain Domesticities is the explicitly feminist exhibition Womanhouse by artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, held at the California Institute of the Arts in 1972. Here, the two artists and their students created a groundbreaking installation that thematized and exposed stereotypical roles for women. For the exhibition, the curator selected works that dealt with the experienced, supposedly biologically determined connection between "home" and "woman" that was formulated and reinforced during industrialization. Or works that thematise the gendered violence that predominantly affects women in the private sphere, i.e. in spaces that are supposed to offer them safety and security. She was also inspired by the text of Virginia Woolf, who in her 1929 essay “A Room of One's Own” exposed the everyday disadvantage of women, emphasizing the importance of one's own room, which she considered as important as financial and intellectual independence for the development of the creative spirit.

Some of the works in the exhibition Uncertain Domesticities refer to the body as our most intimate home. They point to our vulnerability and existential connection to our environment, as well as to the archetypal image of the body as the - temporary - dwelling place of the soul. The artists address the complex issue of sustainable future of the world and attempt to highlight the potential for change. Their works cover a broad spectrum: they illuminate external structures such as planning and construction, as well as the sphere of intimacy, domesticity or security. The exhibition also includes works that touch on traumatic experiences and their transmission across generations or the sadness of the impossibility of return. They point out that the absence of a sense of security and background in a private, familiar space is an everyday reality for many people.

Some of the works on display relate to the history of architecture, which is always an expression of political conditions. After all, the internal and external form of the House of Art was co-shaped by political constellations from the very beginning. The artistic solution of the exhibition, carried by a colour concept designed specifically for its halls, takes this into account.

Housing is a basic existential need of every human being. Each of us can relate to this thesis with our own experience and immerse ourselves in the multitude of memories that the artists activate through the exhibition.

VISCERA DOMUS
The exhibition Viscera Domus presents a spatial-visual dialogue between Helena Lukášová and Michal Palaščak, inspired by a specific building - the recently opened extension of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno, Poříčí, which includes several spacious studios for art students and comfortable resting facilities for students and their teachers with views of the green surroundings. In the Jaroslav Kral Gallery, visitors enter Michal Palaščak's experimentally designed architectural labyrinth, built from basic, already used building materials. The installation provides a framework for Helena Lukášová's paintings, projected onto a holographic screen and stretched into light boxes. Her works evoke a biological structure - a painting of exposed tissue created by computer manipulation. The intention of the artists is to lead the audience through a corridor with views and vistas that offers the ultimate experience of the architectural design of the experimental installation of the works presented, and to show the house not as a utilitarian thing, but as an organism living in symbiosis with man.

The installation will also include the exterior of the building, specifically the balcony around the exhibition hall, which is accessible from the Jaroslav Král Gallery.

“One of the most famous and influential statements about architecture comes from the co-founder of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, who said that ”the house is a machine for living". To some extent, this statement sums up the modernist view of architecture, which emphasises the functionality and efficiency of living. According to this, a house should serve its inhabitants as efficiently and controllably as a machine. At the same time, the advent of purpose, clarity, optimality and economy has conjured up traditional notions of the house. There is no room left for poetry, drama, romance or mystery in architecture. The purely rational approach to thinking about architecture deprived it of the dimension that allows buildings to coexist with people.
Helena Lukášová and Michal Palaščak decided to show the audience one house in a way as if we were looking into an anatomical atlas of architecture. Their depiction resembles sketches of a skeletal system with muscles or organs. The induced insides and internal processes of the house resemble an entity that invites exploration, knowledge and understanding. Rather than a machine for living, the house is an organism ready for cohabitation, in which the house offers utility and the human being repays with meaning."

Rostislav Koryčánek, curator of the exhibition.

Photo: Opening of Uncertain Homes / Tatiana Drgonec Dižová