“Expansions of Homecraft” at Konsthall C
The Living Art Museum is happy to collaborate with Konsthall C in Farsta, Sweden, in bringing works by Hildur Hákonardóttir together for the exhibition Expansions in Homecraft opening 28 May, 6pm.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Expansions of Homecraft is a group exhibition with work by Hildur Hákonardóttir, Toncirkeln (Shida Shahabi and Anna Sóley Tryggvadóttir) and Kristina Schultz with Johan Lindberg and Liss Schultz.
Expansions of Homecraft, the seventh exhibition within the programme Home Works – investigating the politics of domestic work and the home. The exhibition departs from an investigation into the radical forms of creativity generated in the home that challenge hegemonic values of patriarchy, and production, and expand a notion of what homecraft can be. Through the works within this exhibition, homecraft moves from traditional forms, like weaving and sewing, to the craft within the social work of the home – immaterial productions like caring, cleaning and conversing.
The exhibition includes works from the collections of the Living Art Museum, LÁ Art Museum, The Reykjavík Art Museum and The National Gallery of Iceland and has received support from Kulturrådet, Kulturkontakt Nord, NFH Nämnden för hemslöjdsfrågor. Toncirkeln is supported by Musikplattformen och Statens Musikverk Public programme made in collaboration with ABF.
EXHIBITION PROGRAMME / SYMPOSIUM
The exhibition schedule also includes the symposium The Home within Homecraft and will take place on Saturday 11 June between 11-6pm. The symposium will take place in English and is free but booking essential. To book a place please email osa@konsthallc.se.
Through my experience at home […] I also discovered what I now call the ‘double character’ of reproductive work, as work that reproduces us and valorises us not only in view of our integration in the labour market but also against it.
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero (2012)
Homecraft and its connection to historic practices and folk traditions has often made it easy prey to be co-opted by right-wing and nationalist politics as an anchor point for ‘true’ examples of national identity. As a work performed in the home it is also intimately tied to forms of exploitation reliant on housework as undervalued and unpaid labour. While currently nationalist parties gain popularity across Europe we, as a democratic cultural organisation, wish to challenge their ideology as well as their subsumption of homecraft to be aligned with racist politics. The commissions here evident counter practices that pluralise and highlight the complexities around homecraft and feminised production in the home and show what Federici describes above as the double character of this work.
The day invites the participating artists Shida Shahabi, Anna Sóley Tryggvadóttir and Hildur Hákonardóttir, alongside theorist and activist Silvia Federici and art historian Temi Odumosu to share their practices and find ways we can collectivise our strategies for insisting on the radical potential of homecraft.
Silvia Federici is an Italian American scholar, teacher, and activist from the radical autonomist feminist Marxist tradition. She is a professor emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University, where she was a social science professor. She is co-founder of the International Feminist Collective which led to the development of The International Wages for Housework Campaign a global social movement co-founded in 1972. Silvia Federici is a key influence to Konsthall C’s Home Works programme and her writing, teaching and political work inspired our research into the Women’s Day Off demonstrations in Iceland.
Dr Temi Odumosu is an art historian, creative educator, and postdoctoral researcher for the Living Archives Research Project at Malmö University. Her international research and curatorial practice is concerned with the visual politics of slavery and colonialism, Africa in the archives, Afro-Diaspora aesthetics, and more broadly exploring how art mediates cultural transformation and healing. Her upcoming book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes, White Humour will be published by Brepols in the summer of 2016.