Bruno Zhu

On the basis of his own technical expertise in the field of fashion and interior design, the Portuguese artist Bruno Zhu (*1991 Porto, lives in Amsterdam and Viseu) makes objects that embody the tension between the habitual and the culturally unknown. His hybridized objects are in a permanently tense relationship with their surroundings, addressing the mechanisms of symbolic representation.

For the Domestic Drama exhibition, Zhu has developed a site-specific exhibition architecture that stands in dialogue with the works on show. A modular system of walls and doors, for example, creates smaller spaces and niches within the large gallery, thus facilitating intimate encounters with the other artworks. Zhu’s contribution challenges our ideas of the interior — the inside spaces in dwellings, which draws on both individual and collective ideas. What is the drama of domesticity? How does a house become a home? For whom is the home a political and gender-specific tragedy?