Uncertain Domesticities

Concept: Alba D'Urbano and Ina Bierstedt

Uncertain Domesticities at House of Arts Brno presents works by twenty-seven contemporary artists living mainly in Germany and the Czech Republic. The artistic positions presented in the exhibition vary greatly in their approaches and media, while exploring a wide range of aspects around the issues of home, housing, and living. The project’s first stop in January 2025 was at Haus Kunst Mitte in Berlin. As a former apartment building, this venue provided a highly associative framework for the topics addressed in Uncertain Domesticities. For its second edition, the works’ presentation has been carefully adapted to the impressive historical spaces of Brno’s House of Arts.

The exhibition references Franz Xavier Baier’s concept of a ‘living space’, a space that is in a sense alive. Baier suggests an extended understanding of architecture that also accounts for the events and processes imprinted in the materiality of a building. This concept draws on Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, in which the French philosopher writes that our sense of home is not necessarily associated with a specific building, setting, or place of accommodation, but rather relates to the act of establishing emotional ties with a place or a cultural space. This allows for the creation – and inhabitation – of literally ‘happy spaces’.

Another important source of inspiration for Uncertain Domesticities was the explicitly feminist exhibition Womanhouse by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, which was held in 1972 at the California Institute of the Arts. In their exhibition, the two artists and their students created a groundbreaking installation that explored, exaggerated, and thus exposed stereotypical roles for women.

The advent of industrialisation consolidated the division of life into spaces of production and spaces of reproduction and thus excluded reproductive and domestic work from the system of wage labour. As soon as these acts and efforts were no longer considered ‘work’, they were defined as ‘naturally female’, to be performed by women working for naught. As a result, a supposedly biologically determined link between ‘women’ and ‘home’ was established.

Some of the works in Uncertain Domesticities relate to the body as our most intimate home. They point to our vulnerability, our existential connection to our surroundings, and the archetypical image of the body as a (temporary) dwelling-place of the soul. But even our home is not always a safe place.

Gender-based violence affects women mostly in the private sphere, in places that are supposed to grant them safety and security. Until the late nineteenth century, women were conceded very little space of their own. In her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf analysed and exposed the enormous everyday disadvantages that women have to contend with. In so doing, she stressed the importance of having a room of one’s own, which she considered to be crucial for the development of the creative spirit.

In Uncertain Domesticities, the participating artists explore the complex issue of the world’s sustainable habitability, emphasising the potentials of change. Within the thematic field of ‘the home’, their works touch on a broad range of topics and areas, including external structures such as planning and construction, the intimate spheres of domesticity or security, or the interactions between inside and outside, private and public.

Some works look at traumatic experiences transmitted across generations, such as the loss of home due to wars or natural disasters, or traumas caused by oppression, persecution, torture, and exile. Many people have to endure the despair caused by displacement. In need for a natural sense of safety and security, without a private, familiar space, they have to cope with the impossibility to ever return home again.

While the loss of one’s homeland is the topic of some of the artworks exhibited, others engage with concepts of nomadism and community, and also with states of (not) being settled, or of not being able or willing to stay.

The exhibition also raises questions about control and the loss of control in public and private spaces. Some of the exhibited works relate to the history of architecture, which has always been shaped by political conditions, as we can observe in the spaces we currently inhabit and pass through in our daily lives. Similarly, the internal and external structures of Brno’s House of Arts have also been moulded throughout its history by various political constellations – a fact reflected in the exhibition’s design, which is characterised by a colour scheme devised specifically for the building’s exhibition halls.

Housing is a basic existential need for every human being, and each of us can relate to this idea with our individual experiences. The exhibition invites us to immerse ourselves in the multitude of memories evoked by the artworks. Over its fifteen-week duration, Uncertain Domesticities will be complemented by a multi-faceted programme of performances, guided tours, discussions, and events in the public space. The exhibition’s next stop will be the Museo Carlo Bilotti in Rome in 2026.

The exhibition is held under the auspices of the Governor of the South Moravian Region Jan Grolich and the Mayor of the City of Brno Markéta Vaňková.
We would like to thank the Czech-German Future Fund for its foundation contribution.
We would also like to thank Respekt magazine for its media support.

Open Tuesday to Sunday 10am-6pm, extended opening hours until 8pm on Wednesdays.

introductory photo: Susanne Kutter, Transform Fault II, 2023
photo: DUMB archive, Barbora Trnková