A Domestic Life: A Group Exhibition @ CIMB Hotel Art Fair 2022

“...the home is not a stable concept, nor is it a place that is always a retreat or
where identity is grounded. The home can also be a place of resistance and
oppression.”
- Imogen Racz, Art and the Home: Comfort, Alienation and the Everyday, 2015

The past few years had us stuck in our homes and stuck in our own country. The pandemic forced us to think twice about our homes and our domestic lives. While some felt comfortable, many felt trapped in their own homes. It also forced our government to adopt strict measures that affected our everyday lives. Working from home has blurred the boundaries between work and home, the public and the private.

domestic
(adj.)
1. relating to the running of a home or to family relations,
2. existing or occurring inside a particular country; not foreign or international.

The ‘domestic’ implies two distinct meanings at once. Firstly, it refers to the internal, everyday operations of a home, therefore implying a private, personal space. On the other hand, ‘domestic’ is used to describe one’s own country, which can encompass our nation’s domestic affairs. This year’s show seeks to explore both definitions. These definitions allow us to explore issues as personal as our relationships with domestic spaces and objects, such as our bedrooms, or a kitchen knife, but also much larger, nationwide matters–for example, what do we make of the use of familial narratives in political contexts, like our current government’s slogan ‘Keluarga Malaysia’ and referring to our prime minister as ‘abah’? 

Enhanced by the private and public nature of hotel rooms, A Domestic Life explores the complex relationship between the private sphere and the public sphere, and how boundaries between both spaces have gradually become more fluid. The artworks presented by the following 24 artists stimulate a reconsideration of our domestic lives. With graphite, charcoal, and precision, Ong Cai Bin’s The Women Show details the wardrobe of an ordinary woman. In doing so, the artist reveals the various roles women are expected to play through their clothes: an artist’s smock, a cook’s apron, a sports bra, a pretty broderie top.Through the depiction of a deceivingly simple household object, the artist honours the multifaceted nature of women who fulfil numerous roles–be it the cook, the mother, the artist, or the wife–sometimes in a single day. Here, a domestic object holds the potential to initiate a conversation on gender politics.

In Terpasung by Hisyamuddin Abdullah, the artist rightly anticipated our collective paralysis caused by political instability, triggered by the tumultuous aftermath of GE15. Terpasung, meaning ‘shackled’, depicts a black bunny trapped in a ballot box. The sense of suffocation speaks volumes about our current domestic affairs, where our electoral system continues to frustrate and suppress the rakyat. Or, could the bunny represent ambitious ministers, whose beliefs hop from one party to the next, and fail to see and perform beyond the ballot box?
A Domestic Life aims to examine the elements that define our domestic lives: the objects, the bodies, the personas, the relationships. Do they differ from what’s outside our front door? How have our feelings toward domestic spaces (our homes and home country) changed after numerous lockdowns and political unrest? And have our definitions of home, or domestic life, changed?