The second iteration of the research project STITCHES presents HOME AS COMPOSITION, an exhibition focusing on textile in the domestic space and its relationship to composition and decoration.

“What is at stake in housing is the possibility of maintaining a memory. Whether or not we live in the same place as our ancestors, the home relates to genealogy through its museum dimension. It should allow to be at the same time in the world among one’s contemporaries and linked to the past, to one's history.” (Mona Chollet, Chez soi : Une odyssée de l’espace domestique, 2015).

In what way our so-considered “homes” bear witness to cultural, social, historical, and familial histories? If the domestic represents the space where heritage and personal/collective memories unite, how does it reflect individual identities outside the home?

In a joint representation of comfort, daydreaming and confinement, the exhibition stages a fictitious “decorative arrangement” that disturbs the principle of intimacy inherent to the private space. Individuality is erased in favour of a reflection on the notions of social class, aesthetic norms, gender and personal narratives.

Embodying the spaces of KRONE COURONNE, the exhibition reflects upon objects and their relationship to the decorative and the construction of lived and living environments.

Exhibition text (PDF)

Curated by Collectif Détente(Gabrielle Boder, Tadeo Kohan, Camille Regli) with loans by the Collection of the City of Biel/Bienne.

Exhibition supported by Ernst Göhner Foundation and Oertli-Stiftung.

STITCHES
Stemming from the knot as the symbolic figure of connectivity and constraint, but also as the elementary pattern of fabric, the exhibition series STITCHES looks at the use of textiles in Switzerland’s artistic creation in recent decades. The project outlines a reflection on the context of production and the historical development of the material. Emerging and established artists are invited to interweave within several nodal exhibitions. By contrast and affinity, the works form ties and create temporary communities that nourish formal and narrative dialogues between intimacy and extimacy, constraint and liberation, emancipation and domestication.

After a first exhibition at Le Commun in Geneva titled Stitches: Scènes, corps, décors (June-July 2021), the second edition in Biel/Bienne presents the research's continuation around textile, focusing on the subversion of its functions in the domestic space.