This is the House that Jack Built
18 - 28 May, 2023
APT gallery, Deptford, London
Curated by Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasi Organ (No Man’s Land)
Featured artists:
Davinia-Ann Robinson
Rieko Whitfield
Pam Virada
Victoria Kosasie
Emma Todd
Eleanor Sanghara
Natalie Sasi Organ
A Stubborn Bloom
Connie Virdie
“We work towards an alternative vision by creating a tongue of our own.”
Curated by No Man’s Land, a community founded by artists and curators Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ, This is the House that Jack Built offers a live interrogation of what Britain and Britishness mean to conflicting notions of identity, race and love for those living in the diaspora.
The English folk tale ‘The House that Jack Built’ is reimagined, dismantled and rebuilt to complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed, speech dissolved, and precarious structures reclaimed for restoration and repair as the artists form representative rifts, inserting postcolonial stories into nationalistic ones.
Through a plethora of portable relics, artefacts and both ‘functioning’ and ‘function-less’ objects, the exhibition forms ‘Jack’s House’ filled with an inventory of memorabilia and collectibles of tangible and intangible narratives that create a dialogue for contemporary British life. Working through traditional markers of material culture and the domestic, the exhibition confronts modes of ‘Ornamentalism’ and assumed definitions of “exhibition”, “curator”, “artist”, “audience”, “community” and “home”, reconfiguring the space through a variety of mediums.
‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is a vivid retelling of those stories, myths, legacies and folklores from the official voice that fail and exclude the diverse voices that make up Britain today. Storytelling here is self-defence, is disorder, is radical disobedience.
If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard.
Photographs courtesy of Emily Seagrove.
18 - 28 May, 2023
APT gallery, Deptford, London
Curated by Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasi Organ (No Man’s Land)
Featured artists:
Davinia-Ann Robinson
Rieko Whitfield
Pam Virada
Victoria Kosasie
Emma Todd
Eleanor Sanghara
Natalie Sasi Organ
A Stubborn Bloom
Connie Virdie
“We work towards an alternative vision by creating a tongue of our own.”
Curated by No Man’s Land, a community founded by artists and curators Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ, This is the House that Jack Built offers a live interrogation of what Britain and Britishness mean to conflicting notions of identity, race and love for those living in the diaspora.
The English folk tale ‘The House that Jack Built’ is reimagined, dismantled and rebuilt to complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed, speech dissolved, and precarious structures reclaimed for restoration and repair as the artists form representative rifts, inserting postcolonial stories into nationalistic ones.
Through a plethora of portable relics, artefacts and both ‘functioning’ and ‘function-less’ objects, the exhibition forms ‘Jack’s House’ filled with an inventory of memorabilia and collectibles of tangible and intangible narratives that create a dialogue for contemporary British life. Working through traditional markers of material culture and the domestic, the exhibition confronts modes of ‘Ornamentalism’ and assumed definitions of “exhibition”, “curator”, “artist”, “audience”, “community” and “home”, reconfiguring the space through a variety of mediums.
‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is a vivid retelling of those stories, myths, legacies and folklores from the official voice that fail and exclude the diverse voices that make up Britain today. Storytelling here is self-defence, is disorder, is radical disobedience.
If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard.