The exhibition Beyond Nuclear Family: Home Sweet Home seeks to provide a critical revision of the modern Western concept of the family and, through the works of more than forty international artists, explores the alternatives – historical and contemporary, geographical and cultural, utopian and fictional. The third chapter of this long-term research and discursive project, after two iterations in Berlin and in Prague, seeks to redefine the questionable concept of the Nuclear Family and bring it back to its original ‘home’, the U.S., where it was coined and distributed in the second half of the 20th century.
Through paintings, photographs, videos, texts, sculptures, textiles, performances, and installation, the works in this exhibition portray and critically analyze contemporary notions of family, kinship, and togetherness. They bring forth conversations about chosen family and queer kinship; utopian family revolutions and coexistence models; deficiency in cultural capital; fragility and ambiguity of relationship patterns; institutional childcare models; feminist chains of support; as well as familial traumas and institutional care or lack of it. Amongst existing artworks, the show also features newly commissioned works by six Czech artists: Eva Koťátková, Maria Lukáčová, Markéta Magidová, Vojtěch Radakulan, Jiří Skála and Martina Drozd Smutná, as well as a Family Album with small-scale commissions by the former collaborators of the Chalupecký Society, including: Tai Shani, Laure Prouvost, Michelle Lévy, and Egill Sæbjörnsson, among others.
The exhibition takes place within the international project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions.
Exhibition brochure: Nuclear Family: Home Sweet Home
Accompanying program:
Thursday, November 17, 2022, 6:30 pm
EFA Project Space
Diana Adams: The Legal Movement to Take Us Beyond the Nuclear Family
Lawyer and queer activist Diana Adams is the Executive Director of the New York City-based legal nonprofit Chosen Family Law Center, and an international legal leader in advocacy for queer family forms beyond the romantic dyad.
Facebook: @DianaAdamsEsq
Twitter: @DianaAdamsEsq
Instagram: @DianaAdamsEsq
Facebook: @DianaAdamsEsq
Twitter: @DianaAdamsEsq
Instagram: @DianaAdamsEsq
CFLC:
Facebook @ChosenFamilyLaw Center
Twitter @ChosenFamilyLaw
Instagram @ChosenFamilyLawCenter
Friday, November 18, 2022, 6:00 pm
EFA Project Space
Taka Taka: Mothers Mothering Mothers
Dragtivist, educator, queer theorist and independent curator Taka Taka will talk about their experience of being drag mothered by Jennifer Hopelezz, learning from their drag siblings from the House of Hopelezz and mothering their drag kids House of Løstbois as a para-family warm constellation of mutual empowerment. Located at cruise club chUrch, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Saturday, November 19, 2022, 2pm – 6pm
House of Yes, 8 Wyckoff Avenue in Brooklyn (The workshop space is next to House of Yes)
Taka Taka: DRAGGING WARMLY! We play half a day with our body-ies like clay.
Taka Taka as a drag educator will facilitate a collective process of dragging to warm up our sensors, in order to feel our organs differently beyond our eyes’ demands.
Closing program:
Friday, January 6, 2023, 6pm – 8pm
EFA Project Space
Screening of film Strakati by Julie Béna, followed by artist talks with Q&A by two artists whose artworks are featured in the exhibition – Michelle Levy and Chiara No. Introduction by the JCHS curator Tereza Jindrova.
Julie Béna: Strakati, 27 min, 2022, screening
Béna’s film Strakati casts doubt on the stereotypical position of the artist as someone who puts their practice before their family, a situation made all the more complicated if the person in the role of artist is a woman. Chosen with deliberation, the genre of horror and nightmare gives the artist room to play with, and symbolically exaggerate, the roles of mother, wife and daughter. Involving her family and abusing them as performers in a film leads the artist towards catharsis, cleansing and reinforcement.
Michelle Levy: artist talk followed by Q&A
In the fall of 2018, artist/performer Michelle Levy went to Poland for nine months to investigate the 1945 wartime testimony of a Polish-Jewish woman, Paulina, a supposed relative who lost her family and survived on her own throughout Nazi-occupied Poland. What began as an investigation into one woman’s account of survival, has evolved into a story about trying to create a family against biological odds and standard narratives.
Chiara No: artist talk followed by Q&A
In the exhibition Beyond Nuclear Family: Home Sweet Home Chiara No presents a thematic selection of short videos addressing women’s choice not to have a child, created for and previously shared on social media platforms and during the closing event she will talk about this part of her practice. She works in various media, targeting topics such as confrontational humanism, sex positivity, kink, Herstories, feminizing language and literature, ecofeminism, Goddess Powers, re-contextualizing heroines in Greek Mythology and history, folklore, witchlore, anti-capitalism, anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, pro-Others, demonology, abjection, feminist horror theory, nihilism or Heavy Metal.
The exhibition is co-funded by The European Union and Ministry of Culture Czech Republic.
