Artists: Jane Dickson, Kamil Dossar, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dozie Kanu, Mike Kelley, Carolyn Lazard, Klara Liden, Elliot Reed, Josef Strau

The exhibition The chair by the window is an old friend traverses the complex terrain of personal space, exploring the dual nature of our interiors - as both sanctuary and captor. It examines how the objects we choose to live with become extensions of ourselves, physical manifestations of memory, identity, and longing. Our homes are not merely shelters; they can be self-portraits, layered with the weight of our pasts and the architecture of our aspirations.

The warm glow of Josef Strau’s sculpture whispers across a tangle of wires as if caught mid-conversation in the soft static of memory and electricity. Klara Linden’s Bench - formed but not fit for the weight of a body. A similar quiet choreography of presence and absence is available in Elliot Reed’s work - two umbrellas lean and lurch like bodies mid-step, stumbling clumsy like two left feet. The umbrellas themselves are tender emblems of movement, misalignment, and transformation. Mike Kelley’s childish scribble hung proudly on the wall - triangle roof, door, window, chimney, green grass. Dozie Kanu abandons utilitarianism for the conception and weight of family, heritage and presumption. Nan Goldin’s rumpled bed, strewn with tender chaos, leaves quiet traces of a vanished presence still warm in the sheets. These are more than objects; they are relics of the lives we construct and the selves we perform.

But home is rarely uncomplicated. A home can be a refuge, or a cage. In an era where the outside world hums relentlessly through screens and news feeds, the interior becomes a liminal space, suspended between connection and isolation. Are we protected, or hidden? Is the choice solitude, or has it chosen us?

The exhibition unfolds as a journey through these contradictions. The installation aims to echo the layered emotions embedded within our domestic spaces: A video by Kamil Dossar, like his paintings, pulse like a fractured memory loop. Internalized surveillance (discipline via aesthetics) and external (state, technological, algorithmic). Carolyn Lazard’s recliner chair in an active state of adjustment and bodily consideration - insisting that care, stillness, and access are forms of radical architecture. Jane Dickson’s work, painted on rug, implies consideration before entry. The windows, shades half-drawn, inviting a breeze that never quite makes it in. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s mirrored “Untitled” (Fear), 1991, reflects who we believe we are, or who we wish to become. Each work interrogates the ways we occupy our interiors, and how those spaces, in turn, occupy us.

Our homes hold us in an intimate, ongoing dialogue between what we let in and what we keep out. They are palimpsests of our desires, anxieties, and histories. Constantly rewritten, yet never entirely erased. In a fragmented world, where belonging feels increasingly provisional, our interiors absorb the tension. They become sites where comfort and confinement blur, where we hold fast to the familiar even as it binds us in place.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  

Jane Dickson , Kamil Dossar , Nan Goldin , Felix Gonzalez-Torres , Dozie Kanu , Mike Kelley , Carolyn Lazard , Klara Liden , Elliot Reed , Josef Strau .