Queer and Feminist Reinterpretations of Domestic Space
A new wave of artists are transforming domestic space into a site of political agency and intimate reimagination.
For much of modern art history, the domestic realm was depicted as a private, even neutral territory, a place safely removed from the demands of public life. Today, this assumption feels outdated. A growing number of artists are reframing the domestic as an arena of tension, power, and possibility. In their hands, the home becomes a site where identities are negotiated, cultural expectations are dismantled, and new forms of intimacy can emerge.
Zofia Palucha’s exhibition Rich Folks Don’t Explain Shit captures this impulse with startling clarity. Her work refuses to sanitise the domestic. Instead, it insists that personal spaces are saturated with the politics of class and gender. By juxtaposing images of desire and consumption, Palucha lays bare the way power seeps into daily rituals and private rooms. The result is a practice that feels at once defiant and deeply intimate, reminding us that the domestic is never simply benign.
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Desire Inc. offers a different, but no less charged, perspective. Originally produced in the early 1990s, the project explores how technology mediates longing, turning the living room into both a stage for seduction and a site of surveillance. Leeson anticipated the conditions of contemporary digital life, where boundaries between public and private are increasingly porous. Her work feels newly relevant as artists and audiences grapple with what it means to perform intimacy through screens and networks.
Tai Shani’s The Spell or The Dream goes further still, transforming domestic space into a realm of speculative myth. Drawing on feminist theory and fragmentary storytelling, Shani constructs interiors that defy linear narrative. Her installations suggest that domestic architecture can be a threshold, a place where personal histories dissolve into collective dreams.
This convergence of practices signals a generational insistence that the domestic is worth serious artistic inquiry. It is not merely the backdrop to more important events. It is the stage on which cultural, sexual, and economic forces play out in their most unguarded forms.
These works also resonate with the SUPERWRX interest in liminality and the overlapping zones of selfhood and environment. They invite us to consider whether the spaces we inhabit can be re-enchanted, reclaimed, or reimagined as sites of agency rather than confinement. In a world where domestic life is newly visible and newly politicised, that question feels urgent and unresolved.
