Perspectives of Home | Presentation and installation

20.May 2015, 7 pm / KEX Studio

Perspectives of Home

A presentation by Helene Kazan followed by a conversation between Kazan and Dr. Bernd Kräftner a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Science at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and Dr. Aneta Stojnic, theoretician, artist, curator and current postdoc researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and Gerald Nestler, artist and researcher. 

The house or the home is a site where a complex range of values come together under one roof. These values are rooted in the function that the architecture of the home provides as a practical solution to the human need for shelter from adverse conditions. Shelter is provided by the architecture of the home as it forms a material layer, which in the assessment of the potential strengths of that material, is that it should be stronger, more durable and more able to withstand the adverse conditions or exterior threat the human needs protection from. By this process, the shelter that the home provides is an essential human right. 

The presentation by Helene Kazan will form the final part of a three-part installation by the artist in residence in the KEX Studio, which frames multiple perspectives of the home in Lebanon: from the past, the speculative future and the affected present. Using the image of the home as a method for observing the exterior political and cultural environment and simultaneously as a way of understanding the effects this environment might have on the people living within it. Whilst the image of the past visualises Kazan’s personal narrative, the speculative future places alongside one another two contradictory projections of future domestic life in Lebanon, one an image of destruction, whilst the other an image of perceived opportunity. The third installment of the work takes the question posed by the speculative images and asks how does the projection of an unknown risk or lack of, comes to effect the present? 

The installation attempts to map the set of relations that exists between each of the images, to better understand how each frame comes to affect one another. Asking, what in the end what, are the natural and political forces that shape what can be made available as the shelter of the home?

The installation will be open to the public between: 21-23 May from 6 – 9pm, 
and 28 – 30 May from 6 – 9pm.

Or by appointment email: kunsthalle.exnergasse@wuk.at
www.helenekazan.co.uk