Home Economics is the exhibition on show at the 2016 edition of the Venice Biennale; it responds to the Biennale's theme Reporting from the Front by tackling the frontline of British architecture: the home.
The curatorial team of Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams, chosen following a competition organised by the British Council, has invited established and emerging artists, architects and designers to produce immersive 1:1 environments, which challenge the status quo and propose new futures for the home. Home Economics asks questions of British society and architectural culture, regarding the changing rhythms and patterns of life.
The exhibition unfolds through a series of five architectural propositions, designed around incremental amounts of time: Hours, Days, Months, Years and Decades.
Each participant has been asked to propose architectural responses – rather than solutions – to the conditions imposed on domestic life by varying periods of occupancy, and each response inhabits each of the five rooms in the British Pavilion, with different participants responsible for each space.
Hours: Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams
Days: Åyr
Months: DOGMA and Black Square
Years: Julia King
Decades: Hesselbrand