Winnie Herbstein: We Need to Speak about Living Room

Kunsthuis Syb is happy to announce We Need to Speak about Living Room, the first solo exhibition by Winnie Herbstein in the Netherlands. The exhibition unfolds simultaneously across two presentation spaces developed in relation to distinct rural and urban contexts, Kunsthuis Syb in the village of Beetsterzwaag, Friesland, and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in the city of Utrecht. It marks the first collaboration between two interregional art institutions working on feminist legacies, housing and political consciousness. The project brings together newly co-commissioned works and research materials on community led housing stories. 

Spaces of intimacy and political action
Communal forms of living are a timely theme. In the Netherlands and elsewhere, recent years have seen a rise in non-heteronormative housing units, sometimes by choice, sometimes out of financial necessity. In her research and new works, Herbstein brings these contemporary housing questions together with participatory methods drawn from family constellation therapy. She explores how shared ideals shape collective living, but also how tensions and conflicts emerge and how they are addressed over time.

Drawing on traces of Labadist communes in 17th-century Friesland, squats in 1970s Utrecht, and present-day conversations, Herbstein opens a dialogue about new ways of understanding communal life and how we live together. The living room appears here as a site of intimacy, safety, and feeling, as well as a space for political action and awareness.

Site-specific presentation
On view at both Casco Art Institute and Kunsthuis Syb is the film We Need to Speak about Living Room. Shot at the Labre House in Utrecht, the film brings together a cast of participants to enact experiences and conflicts of shared living within a community housing context, as well as the external pressures that threaten such forms of collective life. The work is interwoven with archival material from histories of collective housing and contemporary housing struggles, and is presented within architectural installations that follow the historic structures of both Casco’s building and Kunsthuis Syb. The exhibition is accompanied by a public program that extends the project through situated conversations, gatherings, and collective reflection.

Histories of communal living in Friesland
In Friesland, the exhibition is curated by Arnisa Zeqo. Here, Herbstein also engages with regional stories of communal living, like the early experiments of the 17th-century Labadist community in Wieuwerd: a Protestant movement whose members shared property and daily life after the death of their founder, Jean de Labadie, in 1674. The broader exhibition integrates work from Herbstein’s residency at Syb expanding beyond the film into a constellation of site-specific works: a film on the Ecokathedraal near Heerenveen, a collective long-term land-art project initiated by Louis Le Roy (1924 - 2012); along with sculptural elements departing from Herbstein’s research on lead, an ancient material still used in construction; text works and subtle installations on anarchist and cooperative groups, such as the Anarchistische Camping Appelscha. All the works come together in rethinking the living room as both a space of safety and resistance.

Footnote: The title of the exhibition is inspired by a line from the poem “Towards Home” by June Jordan.

Winnie Herbstein is an artist and filmmaker whose work focuses on historical and contemporary forms of organising in relation to housing, architecture, and the production of space. These themes are explored through practice-based research, materialising primarily in video and sculpture. She recently published the book Slamming Doors: on falling out and fighting back in a housing crisis, co-edited with Mason Leaver-Yap.

Herbstein studied Environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art, building-site construction at the City of Glasgow College, and is a founding member of Slaghammers, an educational metal workshop for women, trans- and non-binary people, based in Glasgow. In 2024–25, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and Framer Framed, and was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2021–2023).