The House

The exhibition “The House” departs from an idea of a certain estrangement contained in the domestic environment. It’s a show at once playful and dramatic, that questions materials and forms of artistic construction and reflects about the limits between art and design.

The pieces, all pertaining to the museum’s collection, aren’t organized by any chronological order or by author, but by the representation of the papers that each of them would have in an actual house. This domestic order would be possible, for instance, if Regina Silveira’s (b. 1939, Porto Alegre, Brazil) couch was meant for sitting, or if Iran do Espírito Santo’s (b. 1963, Mococa, Brazil) record player actually played records. Yet, as curator Katia Canton puts it, “this house isn’t about decoration, design or the functioning of a home, but about art.

Being so, every element inside surprises us and goes against the expectations of an object that could be useful but isn’t. It’s worth remembering that art doesn’t live at the service of practicality. On the contrary, it negotiates with the things of the world, questioning their existence and bargaining with their forms of materialization.

This show is part of a research titled “Themes of Contemporary Art”, a study that takes in account that, throughout Western history until the end of Modern art, art was usually taught chronologically. Today, with the announced “end of art history”, new proposals of learning and fruition of art can be realized, under a variety of themes and temporalities.