In a house, the project by Alba Herrero (València, 1986) and Ana Peñas (València, 1987) was conceived specifically for Gallery 3 at IVAM. It introduces the hybrid nature between the graphic narrative and social research and focuses on housework and domestic work, carried out away from one’s own home, in the privacy of someone else’s home, whether or not this is part of the formal or informal economy. This is a feminised and insecure type of work, where the social construct of its responsibility is mirrored as an inherently female matter. Despite the centrality of this work to the sustainability of life, historically, it has been invisible and displaced within areas such as economics and politics, which today leads us to collectively ask, how do we look after homes and how would we like to do so?

The imaginary stereotypes and ways of naming this work have changed throughout history according to political and cultural changes: from domestic service linked to the rural exodus during the Francoist dictatorship under the nationalist-Catholicism model, to the origin of the current domestic workers and their relationship with the global links in domestic work. The approach to these practices has varied, becoming more complex as the feminist stance has also made it so and the collective organisation of the sector’s workers has advanced.

In a house proposes a review of the personal and the political. From archive materials and the life experiences of women, domestic workers of different ages and backgrounds. It is mostly about domestic work, but also about the employers. The event covers the temporal, spatial and social changes linked to this work. By doing so, it emphasises the social inequalities that occur within these processes. Through different formats – an exhibition, a publication and various public activities – an open re-reading of the family and domestic work models is proposed, the trajectories of collective mobilisation for the recognition of dignified rights and work conditions and the motivations and living expectations of those doing this type of work and those receiving it. In short, this is about the social organisation of domestic work.

With the support of:

The exhibition Far from the void. ZERO and postwar art in Europe offers a review of the groups of artists that overcame the post-war aesthetic and the existential atmosphere by rejecting expressionist painting, materic gestural abstraction and the informalism that dominated the art world after the Second World War. The contributions of the young artists gathered together in the exhibition were central to the “big bang” of art in the decade of the 1960s. Reflecting on ZERO and the contemporary groups that shared this spirit and formed a dense network of contacts, exhibitions, publications and events (among others, Azimut, Nul, Gruppo T, Gruppo N, Equipo 57, Nove Tendencije), the exhibition displays “congregations” of artists who operated without a unified belief or intellectual leader, but who shared the ambition of “starting from zero” for a new way of making and enjoying art., The structure of the exhibition does not have an encyclopaedic outlook, but gathers the most relevant moments of this brief history, set between 1957 and 1966, during which time there is a cartography of the old continent, beyond the big cities, in the provinces of Central Europe.

The exhibition gathers together over one hundred works from more than thirty artists (Mack, Piene, Uecker, Manzoni, Castellani, Klein, Tinguely, Fontana, Dadamaino, Grazia Varisco, Nanda Vigo, Megert, Peeters, Haacke, Verheyen, Schoonhoven, Daniel Spoerri, and many others), as well as numerous documents and archives. The exhibition catalogue has been conceived as a compilation of original sources (texts from the artists, exhibits, etc.), in dialogue with the images of the exhibited works and a selection of the most relevant documents.

The exhibition renews the interest of IVAM- Julio González Centre for the critical re-reading of the artists who, in recent history, have contributed to making art extend the boundaries of perception and awareness.

The exhibition Far from the Void. ZERO and Postwar Art in Europe has been organised with the inestimable and generous co-operation, both scientific and patrimonial, of the ZERO Foundation in Düsseldorf.

We would also like to thank a large number of people and public and private institutions for their assistance:
The artists: Grazia Varisco, Heinz Mack and Christian Megert.

The lenders of the works in the exhibition: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum Kunst Palast Düsseldorf; Stedelijk Museum and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Museum Tinguely, Basle; MuHKA-Centrum Kunstarchieven Vlaanderen, Antwerp; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and Filmoteca de Andalucía, Seville; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Stiftung Kunstfonds, Cologne; ZERO Foundation, Düsseldorf; Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Fondazione Enrico Castellani, Archivio Nanda Vigo, Archivio Varisco, Milan; The Mayor Gallery, London; Galleria Allegra Ravizza, Galleria A Arte Invernizzi, and Marco Meneguzzo, Milan.

We should furthermore like to express our very special thanks for the help of Dr. Barbara Könches, Romina Dümler, Rebecca Welkens and Anna-Lena Weise (ZERO Foundation), Rosalía Pasqualino di Marineo and Agnese Boschini (Fondazione Manzoni), Lorenzo Wirz Castellani and Federico Sardella (Fondazione Enrico Castellani), Francesca Pola, Marco Meneguzzo, Maura Pozzati, Mattijs Visser (0-Institute), Dr. Sophia Sotke (Atelier Mack), Galería Cayón, Lucia Aspesi (Hangar Bicocca) and Iolanda Ratti (Museo del Novecento).