Art that challenges colonial archives
Casa Tomada is a series of three solo exhibitions of site-specific installations created for a 3m-wide cube that visitors enter alone.
Exploring themes of their own choice, invited artists create works that become places for visitors to inhabit at their own pace. Casa Tomada explores the everyday negotiations between isolation and coexistence, ownership and control. Cutting across the varied artistic languages of the three participants, what unites them is their ability to turn exhibitions into intimate encounters.
The 3m-cube is slightly tilted inside the house, refusing to fit into squared alignments. Similarly, the project’s title, Casa Tomada, is in a different language, yet phonetically pronounceable by English speakers: both serve as palatable doses of estrangement meant to awaken the senses and heighten awareness.
The title is borrowed from a short story by Julio Cortázar (1914-1984), a writer known for creating surreal situations out of the most ordinary settings while engaging in political and existential questions along the way. Cortázar’s stories often play with experiences of confinement – such as an invaded house, a cruise, or a traffic jam – offering a light-hearted yet critical look into social behaviour and challenging conventions.
Ana Hupe: Slash-and-burn
First to show at Casa Tomada is Berlin-based Ana Hupe (b. 1983, Rio de Janeiro), a multimedia artist whose practice explores blind spots of representation and builds counter-memories that challenge colonial archives.
Works by Hupe are part of important museum collections in Brazil, such as MAM Rio and IPHAN–Institute for National Historical and Artistic Heritage, Rio de Janeiro.
92 Webster Road, SE16 4DF from 26 September – 19 October.
Fri 12-8pm; Sat–Sun 12-6pm.
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