- Venue
- Home
- Location
- United Kingdom
Fragments of Famili.arity is the fourth in a series of five events in SHOWFLAT, http://www.showflat.org, where artists have been invited to take part through exhibiting in their own homes. SHOWFLAT challenges the relationship between public and private for both artist and viewer as the artist presents their work in a very personal space and invites an interested public.
“Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, or reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing… our imagination and our dreams are forever invading our memories… of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance”[1]. The importance of relation: this matriarchally-led family: Kristina Simenski, Nastassja Simensky and Sophia Simensky explore collective memory through the objects that are carried from dwelling to abode, reflecting not only their shared personal history and identity, the loss and the gain, as women, as travelers: this home, objects, images, are part function, part memoir, part legacy, part fiction, part truth, an with oral history, myth and makebelieve, and the mend and make do of memory and imagination…
Baba Yaga, an Eastern mythological female figure – a terror, a crow, a crone, occasionally seen as a wise woman, represents the collective memory and history of women in this family, an embodiment that enters the subconscious through the invitation of engagement with the objects and images that construct this new home. Nastassja Simensky moved house, brought all of her belongings with her, and as a family, they issued Certificates of Registration from 1920, inviting visitors to enter their world through her Grandmothers immigration passport, then dated 1940. From there, the culture and tradition of these women unfold. Not just these women, but many women, as the demographic of women traveling for jobs, sometimes alone, has seen a significant rise in the latter half of the twentieth century, reflecting the struggle for independence and self-realisation. Odd objects: there isn’t always a choice about what can be taken, what can be brought and what has to be left behind and what is gathered along the way. There’s a clever and expedient family ethos that gives rise to a very playful intervention with objects and spaces, even hiding under the dressing table and the watchfulness, through the eyes of a very small child, encountered in that little space.
There is a surrealistic approach to the objects and images: the sharp tools and blades adorned with tiny dolls hands evoke ‘Nanny Bad Legs’, who adored her back-scratcher. Mounted on the wall, these objects are quaint, charming, but composed of the most unlikely tools that one would use: a rasp. a shoehorn, a carving fork, a tailors scissors. The very idea of stabbing oneself in the back with one of these implements, albeit with a tiny porcelain hand, attached with fine wire, the voile of the dolls arm bandaged to the blade, gives these objects an engaging dialogue beyond their predecessant use. Subverting the function of these domestic objects creates a shock only cushioned by the whimsicality and humour of the notion.
Drawers within cabinets, doors behind doors, the viewer is invited to stand on a little stool, and peek into the nesting cabinets of family heirlooms, of baby hair and teeth, the warmth of a tightly knit family. This perches on top of a teetering gold tea trolley, adorned at its feet with chicken legs, bearing a gold tea and coffee set, glittering and gleaming in its opulence. Emblematic of past social values, of the inheritance of the striving for social norms and aspirations, this piece of furniture is charming, engaging, and playful.
The horn of a gramophone twirls round standing where the old record is pinned centrally, its glints of a gilded floral design caught in the light, music and voice are activated by winding up the machine. An accordion stretched languorously over the seat of a rocking chair, its weightiness pulling it toward the floor. The clock has many faces; time has disappeared and the aeons of generations scrape and spin. Freuds’ ‘Der Unheimliche’ (1925), the uncanny, or literally translated, the un-home-ly, is “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” is prompted in the hypnotic movements of these objects.
Andre Breton published Manifeste du surréalisme in the preceeding year, “to revolutionize human experience, in its personal, cultural, social, and political aspects… to free people from false rationality, and restrictive customs and structures.” The reordering of domestic objects explores this in an evocative and engaging way: the Simensky home is certainly Heimlich, with bone china cups of tea and cakes in abundance, and the observation of generations of interwoven lives, and the intervention in the lost and found of the images and objects that represent them.
Fate la nanna, coscine di pollo (Go to bed-byes, little chicken legs)
Fate la nanna coscine di pollo,
la vostra mamma vi ha fatto un gonnello,
e ve l’ha fatto con lo smerlo in tondo,
fate la nanna coscine di pollo.[2]
[1] Bunuel, Luis, My Last sigh, New York, 1983, quoted in Fragments of Famili.arity
[2] Tuscan lullaby
