Fiona Connor
#1
20 October - 22 December, 2018

Fiona Connor, *#1
*20 October - 22 December, 2018

“Intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse.” Laurent Berlant; Michael Werner, Sex in Public, 1998.

Salon Stuttgart is pleased to present #1 by Fiona Connor. Transposing multiple spaces, Fiona Connor erects the first exhibition at Salon Stuttgart, a gallery located in an apartment in Berlin, Neukoelln. Receding or emerging from the walls, the objects in this exhibition are less individual works and more the cornices and skirting boards - the frames or exterior lines - of a whole other space. These cast sculptures are facsimiles of architectural features from an apartment the artist lived in in the Miracle Mile neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Door knobs, railings, handles, and electricity sockets. In this apartment Conor also ran an exhibition space named Laurel Doody. The works in #1 are impressions of fittings and fixtures from a domestic interior. Their ancestors punctuated the familiar form of an apartment: walls, floors, ceilings; flat and regular until interrupted by an addition, a removal, a necessary alteration. Now relocated to another interior and made temporarily accessible, they are strange yet amicable visitors. They sit in the walls like friendly ghosts strayed from their haunting ground, playing out a mischievous occupancy.

Fiona Connor’s work loosens the boundaries between bodies, architecture, and artworks. Her practice calls our attention to vernacular architecture, to structures from the built environment that enable and facilitate everyday life. Displayed in an apartment-cum-gallery, her works further confuse our notions of the public and private. What does it mean to exhibit artwork in a gallery? What does it mean to exhibit artwork in a home? #1 is the first in a new project where the artist will install works in museums and private homes that draw connections between these different contexts and their communities. Here at Salon Stuttgart, Fiona Connor’s work heralds the birth of a new space, the digestion of an old one, and a forthcoming, dispersed sequence of events. #1 asks whether multiple spaces can become one or whether we are fixed and stranded in our own autonomy. Taking centre stage at Salon Stuttgart, the accumulations of an intimate life are witnessed by and in turn witnesses #1. More than that, the insertion of these objects incorporates them into a body: the wall, the building, an archive.

#1, 2018, cast elements inserted into existing walls

Photos by Nick Ash. Courtesy the artist and Salon Stuttgart.