Household Gods at HART HAUS featured in Artomity, reviewed by Aaina Bhargava.
Protests and pandemics have relegated us to the domestic sphere, where we’ve been forced to confront the anxiety and fear induced by the past year’s events. In addition to political, economic and social disruptions of unprecedented proportions, we’re experiencing emotional and psychological upheavals specifically reactive to this point in time.
Articulating and reflecting on this complex state of being, Hong Kong artists Shane Aspegren, Nadim Abbas, Tap Chan and Wu Jiaru have come together to stage Household Gods, an exhibition curated by Ying Kwok, on view at Hart Hall in H Queens. Lifted from writer and occultist Aleister Crowley’s early 20th-century play Household Gods, the title of the show explicitly outlines its objective: to question our relationship with the supernatural through our “most intimate setting”, the home.
The four artists conceived of the exhibition while working alongside each other at Hart Haus’ sprawling 10,000 sq ft Hart Social Studio in November 2019, before the advent of Covid-19. Despite their seemingly disparate practices, the artists find common ground in using domestic objects, exploring how they serve as channels to activate the unknown or uncanny.
Kwok describes this collaboration as one that distinguishes the exhibition from others, as “the subject was not given to the artists as it usually is, but directly emerged from their mutual interests”. In their own distinct ways, they strive to harness this abstract feeling, one that particularly resonates in the current climate of uncertainty.
“The content has to carry emotion,” says Kwok. “We’re trying to explore or understand the supernatural – something we don’t have an answer to. The best way to do that is through emotion. It’s about the psychological status and evoking a feeling we carry. Oftentimes a divine, supernatural being or power provides guidance when we can’t understand something. The spiritual realm is unexplored and represents a big unknown; there’s an abstract quality to it that we want to explore.”
Text and images courtesy of Artomity.
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