Grazer Kunstverein

Domestic Optimism
Scene One: Modernism – A Lesbian Love Story


Exhibition

Dates
24.9.–20.11.2020

Location
Grazer Kunstverein
Graz

Part of
Parallel Program 2020

Production specifics
In coproduction with Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Supported by Culture Ireland

In the context of steirischer herbst ’20

Colonial aesthetics, obscenity trials, hysterical masculinity, crime scene photography, sexology, the production and obfuscation of the lesbian throughout modernity, and the contemporary collapse of postwar social housing projects, all intersect in Domestic Optimism, Scene One: Modernism—A Lesbian Love Story. This exhibition is a critical queer and working-class reading of architecture, furniture, and modernist aesthetics. The designer Eileen Gray has been an important figure in the project’s research, not as a singular heroic modernist fit for canonization, but as a collectively involved queer woman, part of an extended peer group of dykey women makers in Paris throughout the early 20th century. Weaving together installation, photography, performance, publishing, and collaborative workshop techniques, Emma Wolf-Haugh is interested in reorienting attention in relation to cultural narratives, developing work from a queer/feminist questioning of what is missing.

Artist: Emma Wolf-Haugh

Curated by Kate Strain

Retrospective
Retrospective
Retrospective