Domestic Goods

Domestic Goods features works by Mária Berhidi, Róza El-Hassan, Ágnes Eperjesi, Ilona Keserü Ilona, Hilda Kozári, Ilona Lovas, Ilona Németh, Ágnes Eszter Szabó, Zsuzsa Szenes and Mónika Sziládi. 

Representing emerging, mid-career as well as established artists from Hungary and Slovakia, the exhibition comprises photographs, digital prints, objects, as well as sound installations and videos, offering a rare overview of the artistic production of Central European women artists from the 1960s to today. 

Concerned with domestic economies in both senses of the term, Domestic Goods evokes household activities and spaces traditionally assigned or understood as feminine, while also bringing into play the notion of home as a national, geographic, and cultural entity. 

Taking an ironic look at the gendered understanding of domestic production, the works on view investigate the manifestations of locality, as well as the exchange and the global circulation of domestic products in transnational economies. What happens when artworks, with unprecedented speed and range, become transnational goods in transit, corporatist signs of the universal in displacement? Is there a way to avoid packaging domestic goods for international consumption without romanticizing locality? And is there a way of showing works by Central European artists without turning them into a trade fair of cultural goods branded under labels of simplified otherness or glorified diversity? 

The exhibition explores these and related questions about the politics of difference through the works of ten women artists. 

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