Home: a domestic fiction
David Blandy
April Lin 林森
Royal College of Art
Curated by:
The Unintentional Collective, Curating Contemporary Art, MA1
Louis Chapple,
Raghavi Chinnadurai,
Jiayi Hong,
Xinyue Hu,
Marta Mozzi,
Yue Yu
Project Text
Our project proposal, titled Home: A Domestic Fiction, aims to challenge the logocentric modes of curatorial communication and explore a non-hierarchical process of care in which artwork, artist and audience are situated as equal. Understanding the groups that we exist in to be both intentional and unintentional, we see ourselves as an ‘Unintentional Collective,’ as a model for rethinking social relations.
Responding to a brief from Delfina Foundation as the Unintentional Collective, we have developed a card game designed to explore the complexities and multiplicities of the idea of ‘home’ within our globalised world. Giving agency to the personal histories of participants, a complex, intricate network of narratives can be built through gameplay, out of which a live archive of what may constitute a ‘home’ develops as new cards are added to the pack.
We have commissioned artists David Blandy and April Lin 林森 to design the first two sets of five cards. Through this potentially ever-expanding card deck, the geographic rigidity that the notion of ‘home’ can evoke is challenged, and its ephemerality and temporality are highlighted. We seek to understand how a home is constructed through transient relationships and experiences.
The commissioned cards are set within an installation that seeks to draw on the often bleak and claustrophobic living spaces students and artists in residencies often have to inhabit. With a stark white shell and limited amenities, the cards are emblematic of a notion of continuous homemaking, highlighting identity and representation rather than the physicality of home.
Artist Biography — David Blandy
“David Blandy (1976, Lives & works in Brighton) makes work that slips between performance and video, digital and analogue, gaming and art, investigating the stories and cultural forces that inform and influence our lives. Collaboration is central to his practice, examining communal and personal heritage and interdependence. With research spanning multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, Blandy weaves poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Blandy’s projects involve complex installations, performance, writing, gaming and sound.
Nominated for the Film London Jarman award with Larry Achiampong in 2018, Blandy has exhibited and performed at venues nationally and worldwide, with solo shows at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea; The Baltic, Gateshead; Turner Contemporary, Margate; Spike Island, Bristol; The Exchange, Newlyn; Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. Blandy has also exhibited in museums internationally, including at Art Tower Mito, Tokyo; Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki; Tate Modern, London; and MoMA PS1, New York.”
Artist Biography — April Lin 林森
“April Lin 林森 (b. 1996, Stockholm — they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator investigating image-making and world-building as sites for the construction, sustenance and dissemination of co-existent yet conflicting truths. Working across moving image, performance, creative computing and installation, they dream, & explore, & critique, & fret, & catastrophise, & imagine and & play — for a collective remembering of forgotten pasts, for a critical examination of normalised presents, and for a visualising of freer futures as, of course, imagined from the periphery.
Interweaving strands of autobiography, documentary, queer ecolog, and new media, April Lin 林森’s works are topped off with an inevitable garnish consisting of the other matters in dialogueing with their brain and heart during the making process of each piece. Uniting their genre-fluid body of work is a commitment to centring oppressed knowledges, building an ethics of collaboration around reciprocal care, and exploring the linkages between history, memory and interpersonal and structural trauma.
Their work has been shown at the Museum of the Moving Image New York, Sheffield DocFest, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, the V&A Museum, HOME, Malmö Konstmuseum, LA Filmforum, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Manchester Art Gallery, MADATAC, Arebyte Gallery, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, NOWNESS Asia, and 4:3 Boiler Room.”
Socials: @babe__lin
Website: april-lin.work