Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family

“I am a bit afraid, I admit, but I want to be afraid. Mother, make me tremble”¹

It is at Kunst­museum St. Gallen where our charac­ters are on their first date, driven by the urgency of their early 20s and a desire to ful­fill a certain intellec­tual dream. Our main charac­ter, M, takes the initia­tive to invite S to the museum, situ­ated right in front of a raw con­crete theater buil­ding, because it has a certain warmth amidst all the gray­ness. Additio­nally, muse­ums allow silence, which can be useful if the guy turns out to be boring. M is a bitter narcis­sist. In the end, the only real reason he chose this museum is to indulge his narcis­sism, gain the upper hand on his date and show off. The current exhi­bition Burning Down the House is a group show about family and the social and politi­cal proble­matics of its configu­ration as an insti­tution — despite a certain absence of its depic­tion within the insti­tution of art (history). M is sure of two things: his disdain for both fami­lies and art.

Feeling very lost about what exactly the point of this cri­tique of family is — since family cons­tantly rein­vents itself through diffe­rent forms and struc­tures — S is largely left to his own devices, mind already made up that there will never be a second date. Maybe it is his own relation to his family and his many failed attempts to burn it down, to do away with it, but he wonders to what extent family is break­able, really, and, if not, given its per­vasive domi­nance, why this medi­tation on destruc­tion anyway?

Upon entering the first room, they are imme­diately faced with Kyoko Idetsu’s Safe House (2022), a colourful figura­tive painting that evokes a sense of discom­fort with the concept of family, in turn hinting at the violence that will follow. The text accom­panying the pain­ting reads: “I saw a woman being inter­viewed in a docu­mentary. She said the police broke into her house in the middle of the night and shot her hus­band dead for no reason. I was watch­ing the documen­tary in the safety of my home. At the time, all I could think about was how I could share house­hold chores with my hus­band.” To the right is Evelyn Tao­cheng Wang’s Untitled 1 (2019), a textile collage that also reflects the discom­forts born from conven­tional familial concepts. In con­trast, Niki De Saint Phalle’s pain­ting Joue avec moi (1956), with its wel­coming compo­sition and scale, conveys a humble warmth and reassu­rance to the spectator, sug­gest­ing that family is not solely about discom­fort after all.

They move toward a man-made wall, which sepa­rates the first few works of the show from an instal­lation by Josiane M.H. Pozi titled Pinge (2019–2024). The film is shown on two diffe­rent TV screens with a single bench in the middle, suspen­ding the viewer between its two narra­tives, shot in 2019 and 2024 respec­tively. They sit on the bench as the film plays.

M: You must admit that the family as an “insti­tution” is a banal reality. I mean, it directly reflects what I imagine when it comes to questions and con­cepts of parent­hood and the cultural norms and expec­tations that come with this. The hetero­normati­vity and the power of conven­tional indivi­dualism in relation to the family unit posi­tions us imme­diately as victims: the “family” has always failed us. The roman­ticism of sear­ching for an oppres­sor is handed to us so easily. It seems almost like the chicken-and-egg problem: which came first; the expe­rience of family or its concep­tualiza­tion as an insti­tution?

S: Sure, right the family or the insti­tution, but I thin…

M: There is a certain horror we seem to grapple with when we face what binds us to our family. Being a child seems pun­ish­ment enough — the constant mirro­ring and inher­iting of language, love, tradi­tions and religion. When you find yourself old enough to speak up, your tongue can only reach for similes — like “family as insti­tution” — because you need to win against them, to shift the power dynamics, to acknowl­edge the violence of it all.

S: Rig…

M: Family-as-institu­tion slogans create such mun­dane categories, like the “nuclear family” or “chosen family”, terms I just can’t seem to em­pathise with. Look at Pozi’s words asking her dad, “Daddy, do you love me? Do you actually love me?” again and again, waiting for salva­tion… You feel the neces­sity of the work when you watch the video, which weaves itself into a narra­tive through music, dance and conver­sations. What makes the work so appea­ling is the fact that we find ourselves in the position of the (un)dutiful daughter, with the eroticism of familial pain lurking in our skin. Like every daugh­ter, we are made of flesh and bone. But Pozi is here to break the normative patterns of daugh­terhood — to be able to love your parents while they don’t even have that lan­guage themselves, to become their flesh, their tongue.

They walk in a certain rhythm through the second room. Unsur­prisingly, M has now taken the lead, which contains, first, a video work by Sekyun Ju titled Dinner, displayed on a small screen. The work focuses on a strict shot of a family dinner table, turning the common space into an obser­vational site focused on customs and traditions, showing how the social conduct of morals, expecta­tions and desires is passed on genera­tionally. On the wall, we are faced with the photo­montage collages of Lebohang Kganye, in which the artist has super­imposed herself into old photos of her mother in a haun­ting reflec­tion of grief; Madeleine Kemény-Szemere’s intimate drawings of her husband; Shuvinai Ashoona’s paintings rendered in a colorful palette de­scri­bing different familia rituals of contem­porary Inuit life; and Rhea Dillon’s sculptural work Sole Respon­sibility: Aged 12, but above IX, a crystal piece on the wall shaped like the sole of a foot.

M: It is easy to blame the mother for familial dysfunc­tion, because the “feminine” carries the burden of parent­hood heavier in a patri­archal society. In the end, though, “mother” is domes­ticated along with the child, left alone to be the carrier of the child’s values and morals. But what exactly is it to be an artist who makes auto-fictional or personal work in the context of “family”? If the child remains the subject of their own work, then aren’t we witnessing a domesti­cation or objectifi­cation of the parent as “muse”, or in this case “anti-muse”? In many instan­ces with the works on show, there is an absence of dialogue, the parent refigured as ghost. A ghost not only to the visitor but to the artist themself.

S: You kn…

M: What does it mean to have a difficult family, anyway? I mean, sure, no one gets along with their mom per­fectly, but what this space and this show allow is that every time I see myself in the victim­hood of others, it gives me the free­dom I desire to fanta­size about becoming the subject, to put my personal matters on show and bare my erotics of familial experi­ences in insti­tutional spaces. Like a self-fellating hermit.

They move towards the room that contains a painting series by Ben Sakoguchi. In his satirical works, Sakoguchi pokes holes in the hypo­crisies of white America and its corre­sponding “family values” from the vantage point of the legal system. In appro­priating the label adorning crates of oranges (which popula­ted his youth), Sakoguchi high­lights instances within American history whereby parents and spouses put on trial for the murder of family members falsely accused Black people of commit­ting their crimes as a way to escape punish­ment. In dialogue with the extremely staged family portraits of Buck Ellison, both artists represent the Ameri­can Dream filte­red through the delusions of the WASP. Signifi­cantly, the most promi­nent work in the gallery belongs to PINK de Thierry, a large three-dimen­sional photo­graphic cutout, showing the artist’s family “playing house” from a durational perfor­mance.

M and S then come to a stop in front of Amalia Ulman’s work, two digitally woven tapestry pieces titled Money and the Family (2016) and What to Do About Money (2015). Ulman’s work equips her voice with humor, achie­ved through the tonality of the images depicted in the tapestries. Similarly to Sakoguchi, Ulman appro­priates a template set by the US govern­ment, though this time one issued by the Health Depart­ment in the 1990s to prevent the spread of HIV. Ulman makes simple inci­sions into this history by replacing the word “AIDS” with “Money” and “Poverty”, in turn promp­ting us to question the economic commodi­fication of family life in relation to who exactly has access to become a family.

M: These artists seem aware of the cruelties their work can commit. There is a certain edge to putting the works in artistic spaces only with the subject’s lan­guage lurking, and, of course, the vio­lence is even sharper because not only is it the artist spea­king, but the curator, the assistant curator, the director and many other made-up titles join, like a gang, to provide a new offering: dismem­bering the mother/father over and over again. An eerie dis­comfort will always be present in the curation of the show. Then, I find myself asking: What does it mean to curate an exhi­bition with this eeriness in mind and how far can one take this premise when they occupy both sides of the equation, when they are both child and parent?

S: Hmmm.

They con­tinue walking before tucking into a dark curtained-off space con­taining a work by Terre Thaemlitz. M’s preten­tious mono­logue goes on, his hand gestures get stronger as the loud sound­track of Gillian Wearing’s Sacha and Mum (1996) bleeds in from the gallery outside. S hears a daughter’s scream con­stantly, with no break. He feels suffo­cated in the space and gets more easily distracted, so he takes M’s hand and leads him deeper into Thaemlitz’s Depro­duction (2017).

M: Look at this work. It’s a one-channel video instal­lation. We’re surroun­ded by black curtains which set the viewer in close relation to its haunting stories of families being destroyed by their own politics, traditions and customs. While the oppressed and the oppressor are the family itself, the loneli­ness of close­ted queer­ness, cheating, physical abuse, rape and incestual desires manifest as a violent escape. The family is in a con­stant fight with itself, suffo­cating inside the rules that it has created with the help of the state. Capital is the villain in every narrative we see, but that was expec­ted! Yet some­times there are moments of awakening. Do you remember the Vaginal Davis drawings in the last room that com­partmen­talize the family into a self-proclai­med saint­hood of female­ness? Heroes and fore­bears gaze towards us, proud in full color, claiming their space loudly. Or the ven­geance in the Gillian Wearing instal­lation we saw, where the violently mirrored relationship between mother and daughter takes up theatrical space, with the mother’s physical abuse being played on loop with no breaks, putting us on the side of the oppres­sed, telling us that “you have to endure what I endured”. Or, I don’t know, think again about the cheesy con­cepts like chosen family. I mean, if the family is already the problem itself why do we need to create an alter­native one? Why can’t friends, col­leagues and lovers be enough? I mean, isn’t that what we felt with Ryan Trecartin’s work—a total dis­figura­tion of family? How the ugliness of it, with its gore and distaste, can be what we need as individuals.

S: Yeah! I als…

M is already moving towards the next room while S is spea­king, jetting past Kyoko Idetsu’s painting To Mexico (2022), Louise Bourgeois’s Hours of the Day (2006) and Katja Mater’s Time is an Arrow, Error (2020). Regar­ding the latter two, both works sit between photo­graph, print and sketch, both replica­ting and disrupting time. M and S finally settle in front of Ghislaine Leung’s Hours (2022). Here, after linearity has been disrupted, there is a sense of conclusion, one not only present in Leung’s work — in which the mother’s art practice is deter­mined by a time­table set by the child and through which the child is an involun­tary partici­pant in the work itself — but also in the patri­archal systems the art world is also subject to, and the corres­ponding economic and material realities they produce. Off the back of this, time passes rather unplea­santly with Leung’s work, a remem­brance of (im)possi­bilities.

S: What abou…

M: A lot of the works in the exhi­bition position the artist as the child, but what stands out to me the most are the ones that consider the parent as artist. In these works, the artist is not only the per­petrator, but also the victim of a restric­tive system; one that demands their time and focus while also seeming to abstract the child. In the case of Leung, what makes the work so unner­ving is exactly its abstraction: there are no screams of frust­ration, there is no anger, no agony. Instead, it is a metho­dical and precise instal­lation: Leung rejects martyr­dom when it comes to mother­hood.

S: But…

M: Then I find myself thin­king that the way the hours have been struc­tured in such a precise abstrac­tion is not only a rejection of martyr­dom but also a protec­tion mecha­nism, a way to lure the visitor into the image of Leung as a subject. The narrative is Leung’s — her labor, her child, her self-preser­ved mother­hood — and she is the author of it. Yet then the question becomes: What’s the child’s position in this violence that has been inflicted on their mother by systems that work against her very woman­hood? And, given their involun­tary partici­pation, how might both mother and child have agency at once? The search for an escape from the restrictions and oppres­sions of family will always be an ambiguous one as we desire new systems of familial values con­stantly. Family, as it deems itself in a sacred place, is nothing but a choice that is always bound to repeat itself, but within that choice, what this exhi­bition impor­tantly asks is who is deser­ving of empathy within these current con­figu­rations…

S: And who is actually afforded it socially!

Suddenly, the sound of a baby’s cry floods the gallery and, shocked back to reality, S real­izes he has no clue what time it is. It seems he forgot to pay atten­tion to the natural light in the space. The pair turn their atten­tion to­wards the baby, its cries going on and on. M huffs with frust­ration while S notices the mother getting more visibly uncom­fortable as she tries her best to shush the baby up. As she bobs up and down, lightly patting the back of her baby, he finds himself won­dering which of the two he would least like to be: the mother or the child?

1. Georges Bataille, My Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man. (London: Marion Boyars), 1989, 80.