This is the House that Jack Built

18 May-28 May 2023

PV 18 May 2023, 6-8pm

Overview

“We work towards an alternative vision by creating a tongue of our own.” 

Curated by No Man’s Land, a community founded by artists and curators Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ, This is the House that Jack Built brings together the work of ten contemporary artists to offer a live interrogation of what Britishness means to conflicting notions of identity, race and love for those living in the diaspora.

The English folk tale ‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is reimagined, dismantled and rebuilt to complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed and structures reclaimed for repair as the artists form representative rifts, inserting postcolonial stories into nationalistic ones.

Through a plethora of portable relics, artefacts, ‘functioning’ and ‘function-less’ objects, the exhibition forms ‘Jack’s House’ filled with an inventory of memorabilia and collectibles that create tangible and intangible narratives of  contemporary British life. Confronting modes of ‘Ornamentalism’ and assumed definitions of “exhibition”, “curator”, “artist”, “audience”, “community” and “home”, the space is reconfigured through a variety of mediums.

‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is a vivid retelling of those stories, myths, legacies and folklores from the official voice that fail the diverse voices that make up Britain today. 

Storytelling here is self-defence, is disorder, is radical disobedience. 

If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard.