Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings use different media in their art: film, painting, drawing and performance. [Another word for performance is action art.] Their work questions the way we live together, structures in politics and the recent development of conservatism. [Conservatism means: Someone rejects change. They want everything to stay as it is. They want everything to be in order. In politics, they have socially traditional ideas.] The art of Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings is also about discrimination.
For their solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück, the artists have developed a new installation, [An installation is a work of art in space.] The installation is called Inside. The installation combines sound works with 15 dollhouses, which were found. The dollhouses show different architectural styles of houses. The houses are from Great Britain. They were built in different years. The oldest one is from the late 19th century but there are also houses from the present. [The present is another word for the time we live in now.] With Inside, the two artists ask: How do we see ourselves? How is this connected to the house we live in? How are the two related? The bourgeois house represents very clear roles for men and women. It also represents political power and civic duty. [Civic duty means: I am a citizen. This is why I have certain duties. For example: I have to pay taxes. I have to take my kids to school.] For many women, a house is a place of oppression and labour. But there are different examples in history, too. Upper-class women could use their social standing, wealth and property to have political and social power.
The sound works of the installation have been composed by Owen Pratt. He used tones and sounds he found. But also material he composed himself. In each dollhouse there are loud speakers. They produce a chaos of different sounds. Sometimes, these sounds act in harmony, sometimes alone and sometimes they are all mixed up. The tones and sounds also show: The house is a starting point for all kinds of social relations.
The writer Huw Lemmey has written a text about the exhibition, which you can download here:
text_huw_lemmey_inside_en.pdf
Through our video documentation, you will get an insight into the exhibition Inside.
The artist duo Hannah Quinlan (UK) and Rosie Hastings (UK) live and work in London. Their work is exhibited internationally, including solo presentations at Arcadia Missa, London (2021), MOSTYN, Llandudno (2020), Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on Sea (2020) and Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2020). In addition, their work has been shown in group exhibitions including the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2021), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020) and Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia (2019). In 2020, they received the Jarman Award for Emerging Film Artists. The exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück will be the artists’ first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
The exhibition is kindly supported by Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Niedersächsische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, VR Stiftung and Freund:innen der Kunsthalle Osnabrück.