Daniel Adams, Kate Albrecht Fulton, Ingo Gerken, Anna Kaufmann, César Martins, David Möller, Pierre-Etienne Morelle, Ignacio Uriarte, Roberto Uribe Castro and Felix Leon Westner
Ausstellungseröffnung // Opening
Sa., 17.10.2026, 18 Uhr // 6 pm
Ausstellung // Duration
18.10 – 31.10.26
Do. – So., 14 – 19 Uhr //
Thur – Sun, 2 – 7 pm
Keep the Home Fires Burning borrows its title from Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!* in which she radically questioned the boundary between art and daily work. By refusing the distinction between artistic production and the repetitive labor required to maintain bodies, households, institutions, and society, Ukeles transformed maintenance itself into artistic practice. What usually remained backstage became the work.
The artists brought together here extend this proposition through a recurring question: where does artistic work begin, and where does the work that sustains it end?
The exhibition turns toward the material conditions that make an artistic practice possible. For many artists, making art develops alongside other forms of employment – care work, office jobs, service work, technical and manual labor, teaching, or administration. These activities pay the bills, but they also consume time, shape bodies and routines, generate knowledge, and leave traces within artistic practice. At the same time, the relative independence they provide can create space to work beyond the demands of the art market and institutional structures.
In a context where support for artistic and cultural production is increasingly unstable, these conditions become particularly urgent. How do artists find time to make art? What happens to artistic practice during the hours spent doing “something else”? What knowledge travels from the workplace into the studio?
Keep the Home Fires Burning brings together artists whose work emerges from this permeable boundary between artistic practice and the professional contexts that sustain it. Rather than treating employment as an obstacle, a biographical footnote, or merely a means of survival, the exhibition considers it as a source of materials, methods, knowledge, and perspectives – and as a potential space for resilience and independence.
For artists living in cities such as Paris, New York, Berlin, or London, making a living often means moving between studios, offices, bars, workshops, schools, construction sites, cultural institutions, and countless other workplaces. These environments do more than provide an income: they generate images, objects, gestures, stories, encounters, and memories.
As these materials and forms of knowledge enter the exhibition space, they challenge the boundaries of what is considered artistic practice. Keep the Home Fires Burning looks toward the hours, jobs, skills, routines, and forms of labor that usually remain outside the exhibition frame – but may be precisely what makes a life, and an independent artistic practice, possible.
Curated by César Martins and Roberto Uribe Castro
* “Maintain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight; show your work—show it again; keep the home fires burning.” Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition “CARE“