8 March - 21 April
L’etrangere Gallery
44a Charlotte Road
London EC2A 3PD
FREE
Brunch & Talk: 14 April, 11am.
Free, but RSVP required by 10 April to mail@letrangere.net
Home Strike, guest curated by Alexandra Kokoli and Basia Sliwinska, brings together the work of four women artists — CANAN, Paula Chambers, Malgorzata Markiewicz, Su Richardson — in an exhibition exploring contemporary resistance to the persistent feminisation of domesticity and household maintenance. The exhibition interrogates those biopolitical and cultural norms that see women and their bodies systematically domesticated, exploited and imprisoned by patriarchal ideologies.
The family home is Małgorzata Markiewicz’s battlefield. The artist targets the often glossed-over power struggles of family life, turning the tables on a mother’s obligation to nurture and cherish, whilst confronting the bourgeois expectation for women to entertain guests that simultaneously renders them as complicit objects of desire. Home Strike sees Markiewicz present a set of pristinely-designed boxes filled with the details of poisonous concoctions — more fitting for a witch than a hostess. On the current social position of women Markiewicz comments, “Things are going badly, to put it mildly.” In the video The Resistance Kitchen (2017), the artist, wearing a military double-breasted trench coat, offers her audience recipes for the deadly dishes — perhaps “the only tool of resistance available to women.” She calls for women to defend themselves and “join the resistance kitchen,” in a radical subversion of care-giving.
Home Strike - Małgorzata Markiewicz at L’etrangere
