THE HAPPINESS PROJECT - EPISODE 3: HEARTH AND HOME
17th April > 24th July, 2026
Lizzi Bougatsos | Sylvie Fleury | Richard Hoeck & John Miller | Christian Holstad | Elisabeth Kley | Liam Neff | Kayode Ojo | Patrick Sarmiento |
Dash Snow | Nicole Wermers
“Remember that in our day every cultured man, even the most healthy, is most irritable in his
own home and among his own family, because the discord between the present and the past
is first of all apparent in the family.”
Anton Chekhov
When viewed from the outside, the home appears to be a fortress of stability, where values are passed from one generation to another.
Oftentimes, however, the home is a site of nascent resistance, a breeding ground for opposition. But that utility can only be seen when one is on
its inside, hidden away from the hegemonic forces that suffuse the outside air. Language, government, the fifth estate, the arts are all sites where
our norms are negotiated and perpetuated, but the home is by far the most potent.
The physical structure “house” serves as the locus for family, writ large. And the family is more than a social construct. It is also a psychical
institution, bringing along with it powerful, dangerous and destabilizing forces: emotions, aspirations, the erotic, the private, the individual. The
family’s protection, its envelope, where it remains both outside community and a part thereof, is the house, with its cache of objects that signify
status, store memory, and help form that great ineffable: taste.
HEARTH & HOME is an installation that attempts to replicate, in skeletal form, a domestic setting — the gallery acting as a minimalist stage set for
a piece of Brechtian theater. There are chairs, lighting fixtures, vases, vanity mirrors, and other objects of interior design. The works on view,
however, are hardly props. Although they sometimes echo the real in their form, or physically incorporate functional items, they remain fictive. The
placement of the works — which include sculpture, painting, photography, and video — across the two floors of Zero... generates a jagged,
paratactic meaning, leaving viewers to connect these points of signification to each other and to the exhibition’s motif: to follow its hermeneutic
line. An unimpeded passage through the space, permitting us to read its works in whatever order suits, allows for the unraveling of its weave of
concerns.