“Dwelling is not primarily inhabiting but taking care of and creating that space within which something comes into its own and flourishes.”

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

Meeting Point Projects is pleased to present DWELLING, a group exhibition that explores how the construction of space is inherently linked with the concept of ‘dwelling’ through art, furniture, and food.

Featuring the artists Yifan Jiang, Charlotte Keates, and Iva Kinnaird, Yushi Li, Gus Monday and Tim Wilson, the show curates and contextualizes the works within a gallery space transformed into a living, breathing and immersive environment. Dwelling marks the second exhibition for Meeting Point Projects, following its inaugural show earlier this year, and will take place at 67 York Street Gallery in Marylebone, running 16 September – 4 October 2024.

Guided by Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) concept of “dwelling” presented in his essays “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1971), Dwelling explores the domestic environment as a means through which the identities of people and artworks are expressed. The relationship between human beings and their environments is frequently explored in phenomenology where the processes of finding, creating, and dwelling in spaces are seen as fundamental to our existence and the production of meaning. Amongst spaces that house us, the inhabiting of home is something that is both the most universal and the most intimate.

Responding to the term ‘dwelling’, this exhibition questions how spaces foster ‘domesticity’. Across motifs such as furniture items, interior environments, and architectural structures, artworks in the show examine domesticity as a network of intangible and accumulative qualities such as conditioned behaviors, memories, and nostalgia. Rather than a physical location, artworks observe places that facilitate complex social functions and reveal its occupant’s sense of self and relations with the external world. At the same time, as the art ‘dwells’ the domestic space, the domestic space also ‘dwells’ the art.

For this exhibition, Meeting Point Projects is collaborating with RIBA-registered architecture and interior design practice Studio Ūma to transform the gallery space into an immersive living room – with design objects from Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, Artempo x Studio Ūma, amongst other contemporary makers. Visitors will be able to enter the exhibition as if transported into a private home, blurring the lines between domestic and public consumption of art, contemplating the intersection of art and space, and the role of art in forming private identities and collective experiences.

As part of the exhibition’s events programme, Meeting Point Projects is hosting three supper clubs in The Royal Oak across the street from the gallery in collaboration with three different independent food creators/chefs with a focus on ‘home cooking’. The supper clubs are treated as another ‘medium’ through which the exhibition explores its theme, namely, the domesticity of cuisine and how it is used to pass down cultural identities, traditions, memories, and systems of knowledge.