About Chambres d’Amis: IKEA

Chambres d’Amis: IKEA,” is the second project by Office Baroque in a series of three, developing alternative models for online exhibitions. It builds on the legacy of the 1986 in situ exhibition "Chambres d’Amis," curated by Jan Hoet in the private homes of 51 families in Ghent (Belgium). “Chambres d’Amis” was  a profound critique of the white cube exhibition space. This online version, takes place entirely on the pages of the last in print edition (2021) of Swedish retailer IKEA, in a renewed attempt at embedding art in domestic spaces.

An important point of departure for the original 1986 exhibition was taking art out of the museum and introducing it into people’s homes. The interplay between artists, inhabitants and visitors of the exhibition, beyond the white cube, was a hallmark of the show, ''I am disturbed by the idea that art is here, and reality is there, separated,'' the then 50-year-old Jan Hoet said in an interview. ''I don't accept that argument. If you see the show, you have the impression that you are in the work, not just in front of it.'' The exhibition was covered in a debated six hour long live TV show produced by the late Jef Cornelis. So far for the Ghent experiment and an early attempt at bringing exhibitions into the reality of people’s homes.

“Chambres d’Amis: IKEA” offers an altogether different (digital) experiment in 2022, negotiating a new balance between the domestic space - which is still, as it was in 1986, to be understood as a potentially subversive “other,” - and a different register of meanings and values surrounding the concept of home and domestic space. Demystifying the idea of art and personal space and the ongoing definition of selves, the project is also an oddball study in showing and viewing art online. Much like "La Boîte-en-valise," (https://la-boite-en-valise.com), Chambres d’Amis, offers a conceptual framework that resonates spatially as well as symbolically with our times.

With “Chambres d’Amis: IKEA”, we wish to feature work in a context that reads as domestic: the spaces where people eat, sleep, have sex, wash, dress and live. In the aftermath of Covid 19 these spaces have become both a symbol of the intrusion of personal space, as much as a hole in which the self can disappear into comfort or depravity. 

IKEA’s 2021 pandemic interiors reflect progressive values and contemporary family compositions — single, co-parenting & poly-ethnic in compact live/work spaces. Its cottagecore values of promoting wholesome homemaking skills such as baking and embroidery, decluttering and organizing, combine a rural aesthetic with an anti-technological vision of society, to promote the interior as an extension of the family, an antidote against the diseases of contemporary society as well as against the effects of the pandemic. These interiors are simulacra that are part of an industry of make belief. Paraphrasing French philosopher Jean Baudrillard we can say that IKEA is a manifestation of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle which governs human behavior. 

Where Chambres d’Amis in 1986 offered a radically anti-institutional reading of the home (although the exhibition was criticized for preferring the homes of the wealthy — artist Jef Geys deliberately went in search of poor peoples homes for his disenchanting contributions), it’s 2022 IKEA-pendant balances the home on an axis between a society of control, where exposure of the interior equals moral compliance, and strategies of subtle, to more outspoken resistance. 

Some artists have decided to embrace the fictional environment, with all its potential interplay, others have decided to focus on the machinery that produces make-belief, the expenditures of energy, waste and freedom it discharges in order to be able to deliver a facade of taste and good citizenship. 

"Chambres d’Amis: IKEA" is the second online exhibition by Office Baroque that experiments with online exhibition formats and contexts. "La Boîte-en-Valise" which ran from 09/01 - 28/02/2021 featured work by Yuji Agematsu, Collier Schorr, Lawrence Weiner and Zoe Leonard among others in a reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-Valise. For "Chambres d’Amis: IKEA” 39 artists as diverse as Motoyuki Daifu, Joseph Holtzman, and Dan Peterman have contributed work.