Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings: Bleak House

Kunsthall Stavanger is proud to announce Bleak House, the first exhibition in Norway by artist-duo Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. Featuring an installation of 15 found dollhouses and a multi-channel sound piece, a selection of original etchings, and video work, the exhibition highlights the often-overlooked relationship between interior architecture and the construction of identity, power dynamics and societal norms.

Winners of the 2020 Jarman Award for film, Quinlan & Hastings are London-based multidisciplinary artists working across painting, drawing, video, performance and installation. Their practice is grounded in researching how various communities have been represented at different moments in history as they look to art history and archives to interpret social and political issues facing us today. Amongst other things, they have studied queer environments, explored the impact of austerity, gentrification and policing on urban spaces, and investigated the more overlooked facets of western feminism, particularly its relationship to the political right. Through their work, the artists unpack the various forms of authority, power and disorder within our public and private spaces and question how social hierarchy, class and obedience are negotiated.

Bleak House at Kunsthall Stavanger includes three bodies of work that together weave a picture of the hidden physical and societal power structures that dictate our lives. Following their 2022 exhibition at Tate Britain, Quinlan & Hastings have turned their attention to interior architecture and domestic spaces. The installation Inside at Kunsthall Stavanger examines the concept of the home from a queer, feminist standpoint and offers differing perspectives of the domestic sphere as a place of power and oppression. The installation’s 50-minute looping sound element was composed by Owen Pratt from archival and original material, and alludes to the infinite psychological potential of a house.

Titled Disgrace, the series of twelve etchings complicate the feminist narrative by revealing the entanglement of feminism with the political right. Here, the artists reveal the same ideals of class, gender, and society encoded in the dollhouses by presenting specific moments in history where feminism became entwined with the violence and oppression of colonialism and capitalist interests.

The video work Everything Is Folly In This World That Does Not Give Us Pleasure is composed of text and found footage of LGBTQ+ people dancing in their homes, by themselves, for themselves. The title is a translation of a line from the opening scene of the opera La Traviata, and encourages the characters to drink and toast to life, joy and pleasure. The inclusion of the video at Kunsthall Stavanger shows queer dance as a joyful and defiant reclamation of domestic space.

The artworks presented in Bleak House reveal how societal ideals are embedded in our physical and political structures. The exhibition tells a history of norms and fantasies about family life, gender, power, and sexuality, and points towards joyful ways we can individually and collectively imagine an alternative future.