Home Like | Martin Visok

Curator: Sabrina Cegla

“Home Like,” a solo exhibition by artist Martin Visok, is the twelfth exhibition in the Liebling Haus Project Room. The exhibition explores notions of home and belonging, and asks: what remains of a home when the life once lived in it is gone?

Liebling Haus was built in 1936 as a residential building by German immigrants and now serves as a public cultural center for architecture and urbanism. Though its purpose has changed, its name still attests to its past. Out of this tension, Visok sets out in search of the idea of home.

Visok conducts this search through the historic kitchen of Liebling Haus – the only space in the building that has remained nearly unchanged since its days as a residential building. Using concrete reliefs and a photographic collage that moves between documentation and fiction, he reassembles the kitchen with its details, but in a new order.

Visok addresses the kitchen’s details, dimensions, and proportions; the meaning of architectural elements such as the Project Room’s threshold; and the relationships between the different elements of the space. From these, he creates a room within a room. In contrast to modern architecture, which assigns every space a clear function – and to our reality, in which every square meter is measured by its monetary value – Visok leaves room for excess, remnants, and unresolved spaces. In doing so, he unsettles the architectural logic of the home and the perception of architecture as stable and fixed, proposing instead to think of the concept of home as a space in constant flux.

Visok invites visitors to linger and let their gaze reveal layers of time and memory – a memory that is not stable but constantly built and dissolved, in search of the meaning of home and the soul of its spaces.

With the idea of home currently so fragile, vulnerable, and charged for so many, Visok’s installation invites us to look anew at the meaning of Home and imagine it as a place we can return to, dwell in, and dream of the future.