The architect and the housewife

Who gets to design ‘the house’ and who takes care of it? This international group exhibition brings together contemporary artists who are making work about the realities of maintaining their artistic practice when the tasks of everyday life need to happen too. These works deal with care, scale, collectivity, visibility, repetition, domesticity, unlearning, what counts as ‘work’ or an artwork. The title of this exhibition is taken from artist Frances Stark’s 1999 publication, The architect and the housewife, in which she introduces the characters of ‘the architect’ and ‘the housewife’ to explore power dynamics in art and life. Over a quarter of a century later, Frances Stark’s concerns are still strikingly relevant. For, amid the big concerns of our age, the dinner still has to be cooked and the laundry still needs to be done. The architect and the housewife: cleaning the house, building the future marks the start of a process of examining the site, history and collection of Groninger Museum with open curiosity, starting with its iconic postmodern building. With this new chapter, the museum looks backwards and forwards. It reconnects with this building’s visionary spirit and the experimental approach of Groninger Museum in the 1990s, and makes space for the urgent questions of the twenty-first century: Back to the future!