Alice Rekab: Mehrfamilienhaus

Museum VILLA STUCK presents Alice Rekab’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. Rekab explores cultural and personal narratives—stories that are told about us and by us. The artist’s Irish/Sierra-Leonian identity serves as a starting point to reflect on realities of life, experiences of growing up, and family histories. What shape does our belonging take? The joys and traumas of our existence are viewed through the prisms of body, family, and nation state.

The exhibition in the RICOCHET series shows existing and new work. The latter were created during Rekab’s 2021 AIR-M Residency at the Villa Waldberta and the 2022 Kunstverein München Peripheral Alliances Residency. Exploring mimetic, amateur, and regional methods of cultural production, Rekab develops a hybridized visual language. Their transdisciplinary work spans collage, film, installation, sculpture, and text.

Through their presentation of these works at the Museum VILLA STUCK, Rekab creates connections and confrontations between intergenerational experiences of race, place, and belonging, connecting with the sites of their residencies, Franz von Stuck’s home, and its former occupants. These site-specific installations integrate materials and furniture from the respective locations that Rekab encountered during their time in Munich.

For in Rekab’s understanding of the term site-specific also implies the effect created when objects with the particular stories they hold are brought into spaces that have a narrative of their own. Formally and conceptually, this creates friction. In this way, Rekab depicts the experience of mixed-race identity by way of example. What Rekab brings together doesn’t always fit together, doesn’t always blend in harmoniously, and yet it must be carried or held by a single body. Disruption and tension due to a deviation from viewing habits are intentional and seek to question expectations of comfort, acceptability and taste within the museum space.

Rekab first encountered the title of the exhibition, “Mehrfamilienhaus” (German for a home to more than one family, or multi-family apartment building), when their father lived in Germany for several years and suggested that the entire widespread family could live in a single house. Rekab adopts the idea of a three-word composite to create a new meaning: they bring together cultures, narratives, and materials belonging to their own body, their art, and the history of the actual residences that were important to them during their stays in Munich: Museum VILLA STUCK and the locations of their two residencies.

Artist biography
Alice Rekab lives and works in Dublin. They attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin (BA 2008), Goldsmiths College in London (MA 2010), and the Kingston School of Art in London (PhD 2018). Solo exhibitions at Douglas Hyde Gallery (2021–22) and Temple Bar Gallery, both in Dublin (2021); and numerous group exhibitions (Galway Arts Centre; Catalyst Arts Centre, Belfast; Temple Bar Gallery+Studios, Dublin; VERY Project Space, Berlin; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Tate Liverpool; Stanley Picker Gallery, London; Frieze Art Fair, London). Rekab received the Culture Ireland Award (2023, 2022), the Arts Council Ireland Visual Arts Bursary Award (2022, 2020), the Arts Council Ireland Visual Arts Project Award (2021), and the Temple Bar Gallery Artist Studio Award (2019-2020, 2020–2023). Their work is included in the following collections: Trinity College Dublin Collection; The Cathal Ryan Trust; Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection, Dublin; The Arts Council Ireland Collection.

Catalogue
The publication accompanying the exhibition is the first monographic book devoted to Alice Rekab. Published in German and English by DISTANZ Verlag, with graphic design by Nicola Reiter, the book contains numerous illustrations, including installation views. With contributions by Alice Rekab, Anne-Françoise Schmid, Cairo Clarke, and Isabelle Sully as well as a conversation between Alice Rekab and Sabine Schmid. Planned publication date: late March.

An exhibition of Museum VILLA STUCK, Munich.

Curator: Dr. Sabine Schmid

In cooperation with the Residency AIR-M Villa Waldberta of the City of Munich and the Residency Peripheral Alliances of Kunstverein München.                               

Kindly supported by Culture Ireland, #cultureireland

Press/contact: presse.villastuck@muenchen.de