Bunker exhibitions present ‘The house Alice built’

ISTANBUL

In the exhibition, supported by Goethe-Institut Istanbul, starting from their reflection on modernism and the Bauhaus culture, the artists and architects Aslı Serbest and Mona Mahall show a series of works and speculative research on feminist spatial utopias. 

Modernism has long been questioned for what Walter Benjamin called the destructive character; for those utopian aspirations of total reduction and the tabula rasa regarded as bound up with paternalistic, colonial, and totalitarian attitudes. Alternative approaches to this modernism constitute the topic of the research-based work “The house Alice built.” 

With this work, Serbest and Mahall explore utopian projects that, informed by feminist theories and practices, have reimagined modern (domestic) space. They collect and develop speculations on houses and scenes that subtract from a given set of rooms, actors, and functions, without destroying them completely: These speculations remove the kitchen from the apartment (the house Alice built), Romeo from Romeo and Juliet, and eliminate elements that separate social spheres. 

Based in Berlin, Serbest and Mahall have been working as a collective since 2007. In their research-based practice they reflect and produce space through various media including architectures, exhibitions, installations, scenographies, as well as (video-) texts, concepts, and publications. 

Their projects are explorations of particular past, present and future contexts and aim at negotiating the evolving relationship between architecture, art, and the political.