Pillowtalk

If we think of the word home, most of us imagine a safe, warm space we look forward to come back to after interactions with the outside world, running errands and draining small talks. A carefully curated collection of furniture, dishes, memory artefacts, small pleasures. However, the past few, pandemic and war stained years, pushed us to reimagine what home actually is. For some, it is a warm space and a place for decompression. For others, it’s a memory forever lost, an unreachable state of being, a battlefield, an uncanny site of precarious labor, neoliberal production, consumption and biopolitical control. 1 And the walls give us both a loving hug and a punch into the stomach. A solo exhibition of Trin Alt explores the notions of intimacy and comfort, but also discomfort that unfold behind the closed doors, in a place we call home. Home, as a space of (desired) care and comfort, home, as a fabricated scenography that is never finished, home as a place of bitter nostalgia. Trin’s body of work, selected for this exhibition, triggers an intense feeling of familiarity, a shared experience that smells like something we have already encountered. Set into a specific environment of a boxing gym, the artworks create a certain tension between an imagined tenderness of home and a presumed violence of the gym. But, a home can also be a place of violence and a boxing gym can be a place of care and tenderness. Painted duvets with decades old sweat stains and odors still stamped into them aestheticize a peculiar kind of softness and vulnerability we all experience while lying in the bed (at home). Bed, a stage for (re-)encountering memories, anxieties, night- long pillowtalks, body performances. A symptom of homeliness. Helmets as metaphors of home, that protect us from the outside world, but break if we fall way too badly. Together with his works, Trin’s inviting us into a space where affection and authenticity meets distress and disappointment, that we might call home, but not quite. Ema Čabová