Marc Camille Chaimowicz
Since the 1970s Marc Camille Chaimowicz has been working across media - furniture, paintings, sculptures, textiles - to explore domestic space and how people shape it, inhabit it and give meaning to it. Rooms become a way to materially and metaphorically represent oneself to others, blurring the distinction between public and private. Objects tell something about ourselves, our background and the cultural and historical context in which we live. In Chaimowicz's work hierarchies between art and ornament dissolve, objects loose the limits given by everyday functions becoming soft, mellow, beautifully disproportionate.
The spirit of modernism and the atmosphere of upper-class apartments are often the privileged subjects that get distorted through prints, colors and "alien" objects. All of these vivid depictions are in fact interwoven with literary, theatrical and painterly references and invoke other worlds through allusions creating what Gaby Wood fairly defined "a post-modern Gesamtkunstwerk”. In the work of Marc Camille Chaimowicz objects are not functional or consumistic props as they acquire major artistic and psychological qualities. Dreamy-like inner worlds clashing with the outside.
Keywords: interior design, stage, metaphor, representation
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Nil Yalter, Nomad’s Tent (Topak-ev/La Yourte): A Study of Private, Public, and Feminine Spaces, 1973
Topak-ev / Nomad’s Tent is possibly Yalter’s most iconic work. Realised in 1973 for her first solo exhibition at ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the installation marked the beginning of Yalter's use of sociological and ethnographic methods in her work, influence by the her meeting with the ethnologist Bernard Dupaigne. The work recalls Yalter visit to Niğde - a town in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey where nomadic communities with shamanic beliefs migrated around the 10th century - and draws inspiration from the temporary dwellings once built by the nomads.
Inside the Tent, further elements are embedded within the main structure pointing out to specific societal and political issues. As highlighted by Nazlı Gürlek, the rugs and the knitted details were often made exclusively by women and associated with perceptions of female beauty and fertility. By including these features, Yalter records rules and customs that entrap women in domestic spaces back to the ancient traditions of Central Asian communities. This aspect is then closely intertwined with two other core topics, that of nomadism and spirituality, conceived as a deeper personal and collective relationship to nature. The tent is an archetype, which contains within itself a layered history and a dense meaning. With this work Yalter creates and claims back a space that it’s not only for her but for all women and migrants, categories historically marginalized by society. A place for rest, contemplation and healing.
Keywords: nature, shelter, atavic, nomadic subjects
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Heidi Bucher, Fliegender Hautraum (Flying Skinroom), 1981
In 1973 Heidi Bucher initiated the series of Raumhaut (“room skins”) in which she started using gauze and liquid latex to take the imprint of walls, furniture, clothing and a number of common objects. This process of coating and skinning objects was established by the artist as a way to make the symbolic, genealogical and political density of such places tangible. Without any distinction, the artist approaches all objects in the same way. All acquire a similar materiality and temporality, becoming physical and durable memories of ephemeral things. The architectural structure loses its functionality to become a reflection of feelings and emotions, embedded in the time, the manuality, and the contact between the artist and the single object. By means of the process of casting and skinning, the artist creates a new reading of the space, more intimate and emphatic, intertwined with her own feelings and memories. A mantra she often repeated, Räume sind Hüllen, sind Häute (Spaces are shells, are skins), suggests that she considered all such elements, including memory, as spaces.
A further element that enriches the reading of the works is the display. Some of the works are hung, soft and fragile once emptied of life. Others are left floating, light in the sky, giving them a new dimension and a new position. After experiencing space in its contingency and presence, the artist frees these places, making them something else.
The house for Bucher is an intimate space in which to dig into. Despite the universality of its forms, it holds and narrates personal moments and experiences, private memories that make themselves vulnerable but never totally obvious.
Keywords: materiality, architecture, process, memories
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Ana Vieira’s Ambiente/Sala de Jantar (Environment/Dining Room), 1971
In her work Ana Vieira develops a post-pictorial approach for which she uses a range of materials and devices as screens and wooden elements, pieces of furniture, fabric, mirrored glass. As in the work of Carla Accardi, painting, sculpture and architecture are merged together to create experiential spaces. However, for Vieira these structures are directly connected to everyday life, recalling indefinite but familiar shapes and situations. In Sala de Jantar, the artist inscribed blue silhouettes of furniture and other common objects on four suspended strips of semitransparent fabric. Within the space, an audio recording transmits sounds of a meal, diners chatting and the noise of cutlery and plates clashing. In her artistic research, Vieira uses common objects to talk about social situations, affection and memory. Themes that find in the domestic realm a privileged context.
Keywords: domesticity, family, memory
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Lucy Orta, Refuge Wear Intervention London East End (1998)
In 1992 Lucy Orta realised Habitent, a portable habitat designed for basic personal comfort and urgent mobility for nomadic populations. The structure of the garment was conceived in order to simultaneously offer a space for basic human needs and a spiritual refuge. To make the invisible, visible again. Over the years, this series has developed through collaborations and in response to major political events. From the individual structure, Orta created a series of collective occupations. Prompted by the need for shelter and clothing for the Iraqi and Kurd refugees fleeing war zones and the increasing population of homeless young people living on the streets in major metropolis, Orta created a number of portable habitats that were then installed in various major cities as public interventions to denounce and highlight the difficulties experienced by those who were forced to live on the margins of society. Peripheral urban spaces such as squats, railway stations, housing projects, bridges and subways were chosen as arenas for simultaneous happenings.
Keywords: clothing, architecture, interventions
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Birgit Jürgenssen, Nest, 1979
Nest shows a bird’s nest with two small eggs nestled between the crossed legs of a figure wearing tights, suggesting that the subject is a woman. In the picture the body becomes a shelter, soft and blurry but lacking any human connotation. The removal of the upper body contributes to the dehumanization of the subject, which withdraws itself from any type of sexualization. In this work the artist reflects again on the autonomy of the female body and the functional use is made of it within society. As mother, home, carer the woman is finally free from the male gaze, but it has still to delegate its agency. An atavistic representation set up within a modern context that brings together two distant but enduring realms.
Between 1996 and 1998, Nest is included in another work of Jürgenssen called Interieurs (Interiors), in which the artist combine interior decoration drawings from the book The Instant Decorator (1976), with images that deconstruct their conservative 1960s and 1970s middle class aesthetic. Nest is paired with the outlines of a typical bourgeois kitchen interior that satirise the idea of designing one’s home as a personal ‘nest’ while using the same standardised aesthetic as anybody else.
Keywords: body, agency, motherhood
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