Karolien Chromiak:
To glitch the home (to heal)
Gathering in a temporary intervention
Hosted by Karolien Chromiak & Gary Farrelly
Friday 16 April, 20.00: online gathering
Saturday 17 and Sunday 18 April, 11.00 - 18.00: temporary intervention on view in in Kunsthal Gent
In German, the word “heim” is a part of the word “unheimlich”. In other words, you can’t speak about horror, without speaking about the home. When we look at the Dutch language we find the same linguistic ambiguity. The very first word that was used to refer to the home is “hol”. A hole in the ground was a place where our nomadic ancestors found shelter and hid themselves for danger. The word “hel” comes from this very same word, as it refers to a hidden worldaka the underworld. Again this link between horror and the home. The word hol/hel, however, was in Old English written down as “heal”. It is precisely this what the project aims to do: to heal the home.
This project glitches the home and the position that it entails in a patriarchal late-capitalist landscape. Between the Western European witch hunts in the middle ages to Poland that currently completely banned abortion, there have been consistent attacks on our homes, the places where we find shelter. Why is it that for minority groups the concept of home is so traumatic? From the oppressiveness of social housing architecture, the position of privilege that organised nature in cities entails to the exclusion of queerness in the nuclear family, inequality is seen whenever we think of home.
During the event in Kunsthal, a temporary environment is created - a real-life shelter with a digital skin - in which Gary & Karolien will host an associative journey through the research of the project.
Karolien Chromiak (°1989) is a Brussels based visual artist that explores the connection between the digital and the natural. In her artistic research she implements the techniques of glitching and gathering in order to disrupt the hidden myths that shape our environment and to create spaces-in-between. Her multimedia practice often takes the form of mixed media installations in which natural objects and digital images form a strange, fictional environment.
Her work was shown at, amongst others, SMAK Ghent (BE), MHKA Antwerp (BE), Rundum Art Space, Tallinn (EE), Art Rotterdam (NL), Villa Fleming, Beirut (LB), Crosley Gallery, Florida (VS), Pilar Brussels (BE). She was selected by an international jury to participate in the first edition of STRT Kit Residency and was the co-founder of LIIIm³ artspace. She is supported by the Flemish government and is a member of Level Five, an artistic ecology in Brussels, Belgium.
