Domestics

Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.

With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessarily small gatherings. We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

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Irene Fernández Arcas: Stand By
June 6 – July 4, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00
Commencement: Saturday, June 6, 18:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Activations: June 12, June 20 and June 25 (see below)

Hygienic measures: The space of TIER is 100 m² total, allowing for maximum 5 occupants. Up to 2 guests and 3 staff are allowed inside simultaneously. For the Commencement on June 6, please register a time to visit to ensure that you can enter the space (click here). We provide hand disinfectant at the entrance. Please keep the minimum distance and wear a mask that covers your mouth and nose.

One of the elements that became quite fundamental during the recent period is the need for self-care. Since a long time, with Audre Lorde we have learned that self-care is an act of political warfare. This time of necessary confinement has shown again and in a new dimension the radicality of her words. The domestic space, as a conceptual and architectural framework, can be seen as a container for life. It is a domain that is demarcated by visible and invisible structures, by interfaces that regulate the flows of information and materials. It is also the inner space of the self, the space of rituals, morning routines, celebrations of joy, practices of health and the rhythms of the body. In her exhibition at TIER, Irene Fernández Arcas introduces installative elements into the space that institute a flow of ideas and resources related to the inner space of the home and the mind. Through a series of activations, including a durational plant cutting exchange that everyone is invited to participate in, the exhibition emphasizes different facets of her practice. She proposes this constellation of materials and affects as a laboratory to develop a domestic ritual, an invitation to create a space of one’s own, a holistic space to connect with processes of commoning. In this way, she recovers elements of joy and astonishment from the forgotten rhythms of life, and indeed before the institutionalization of the domestic space and rationalization of the body as a discrete element separable from the complex whole. Self-care as a counter-disciplinary ritual might be one of the ways the artist is researching to restore those rhythms.

Activations

Durational – Plant Cutting Exchange
Bring your plant cutting and take one from the installation.

June 12, 19:00 – Be healthy, stay now; stay healthy, be now. (online)
A conversation between Irene Fernández Arcas & Maxence Allain – about self care, health, nowness and simple guidelines on staying confident, amid the pandemic crisis and always.
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/TheInstituteForEndoticResearch

June 20 – New Moon Ritual
Spots are limited.
RSVP to hello@irenefernandezarcas.com for information.
We will contact you with details about it.

June 25, 19:00 – Collective Reading (online)
“The erotic, sensuality, mythology and feminism”
With Tarn Rodgers Johns & Irene Fernández Arcas
RSVP to hello@irenefernandezarcas.com
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/TheInstituteForEndoticResearch

Irene Fernández Arcas is an interdisciplinary artist. In her work, she explores new conceptions of spirituality and the healing powers of art. She creates installations, performative rituals, drawing, painting, photography and text. Her artworks are an experiment and a research into personal domestic rituals, womanhood and the process of art itself. They are an invitation into the present moment and the unfolding Now.

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Luiza Prado: In Weaving Shared Soil

In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.

Initiated by dance curator Elena Basteri, Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch (The Institute for Endotic Research), the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting. The House is the Body develops around the theme of somatics.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.

Photos by Benjamin Busch

Friday, February 7, 19:00
Interiors
An intervention by Tracey Snelling in the Manual Model Museum

Interiors
Within cities, one can live in close proximity to many people, but often rarely know their neighbours. There can be a sense of isolation which contrasts to the amount of people in an area. Tracey Snelling has always been curious about what people do, how they live, and what happens behind closed doors, and also in public/private spaces, when people are alone. As a guest of The Institute for Endotic Research, she will present 3 small small-scale room sculptures in the Manual Model Museum, a glass vitrine and conceptual device. On February 7th, we will present the mini exhibition, and also have a discussion about the artworks, her process, and the idea of neighbours, privacy, and social and domestic spaces.

Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and large-scale installation, Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience. Her work derives from voyeurism, film noir, and geographical and architectural location. Within this idea of location, themes develop that transport observation into the realm of storytelling, with reality and sociological study being the focus. Snelling has exhibited in international galleries, museums and institutions, including the The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium; Palazzo Reale, Milan; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; and El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota, among other places. In 2015 she received the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2017, Snelling was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and also completed a permanent sculptural commissions at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt. She was a 2017/2018 artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Her work most recently showed in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, sponsored by Swatch, and in the Havana Biennale 2019. Snelling will soon begin residencies at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, and TOKAS, Tokyo, Japan. She will have solo exhibitions at Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam; Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Milan, in collaboration with Studio la Citta; and in Berlin with H27 Gallery, opening February 1st. Snelling lives and works in Berlin.

Manual Model Museum
MMM space reflects on the potentialities and possibilities of micro-scale exhibition making. It is inspired by Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, where the writer handled the building as the structure for the book’s narrative.