Riverrun: Bunker Exhibitions, Istanbul
December 14, 2018–January 26, 2019
Starting from their reflection on Modernism and the Bauhaus culture, the artists and architects Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall show a series of works and speculative research on feminist spatial utopias. Set up on both floors of the gallery their installation provides a methodological activation of emancipatory ideas and practices to reshape our shared spaces.Modernism has long been questioned for what Walter Benjamin called the destructive character; for those utopian aspirations of total reduction and the tabula rasa regarded as bound up with paternalistic, colonial, and totalitarian attitudes. Alternative approaches to this Modernism constitute the topic of the research-based work The house Alice built. With it Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall explore utopian projects that, informed by feminist theories and practices, have reimagined modern (domestic) space. They collect and develop speculations on houses and scenes that subtract from a given set of rooms, actors, and functions, without destroying them completely: these speculations remove the kitchen from the apartment, Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, the state from democracy. Following a method of subtraction (n-1), they eliminate elements that separate social spheres. The n-1 drafts formulate not Modernist major projects but concepts of minor operations that however allow for new spatial connections and relations. In that they provide the ground on which we might evolve more open social, political, and aesthetic forms of living together.
Gallery (4 images)
