7.9.–12.10.2024

The hallway is full of shoes that are impossible to find. Odd ones will do just fine. Or ten sizes too big. A soda bottle of one and half liters fits inside A’s shoes. H’s shoes won’t fit anyone else. Party. You have to have cigarettes and alcohol. Who’s getting them? Who do we call to get the parents to sneak out? Who’s going to have a crush and who’s going to throw up? Who’s even coming?

Nothing special happened tonight either, though. I wish K would have a party. I wouldn’t drink anything, W is my sobriety pledge.

Anticipation, excitement and maybe even fear alternate.

It’s annoying that everyone has been talking about the parties for a month now. It takes some of the fun out of it.

It’s exciting. Is this the moment when everything changes. We’re on our way someplace, somewhere still unknown.

I wish something would happen. I miss something so much, I don’t even know what it is.

House parties are an invitation to get together, to celebrate, but they are also so much more. Learning to be in the world. Finding your own boundaries, defying them. Imagining. The things that can happen. Always something to look forward to. Learning, exploring, wondering. New neighborhoods, houses, homes. You can live like this. A house party (exhibition and phenomenon) challenges space and its expected use. How does a private and defined space change, stretch and give way when it becomes collective, momentarily shared, when space is exposed to different acts and experiments?

The exhibition is born like a house party. New and exciting people have been invited, people you have long wanted to get to know but have not dared to without a good reason. And then there are the people you know are easy, safe, lovely and always fun to be with. You’ve created megalomaniacal expectations and feared for a total failure. Can you do this? Maybe someone calls the cops or the drinks run out.

Anna Jensen and Eliisa Suvanto have invited 14 artists to a group show at SIC, which explores experimentation, the joy of being and working together, potential failures, and the exhibition as a monument and memorial to the process. Kotibileet! / House Party! has been created as a parallel project to the exhibition Statuomania curated by Porin kulttuurisäätö, which will open in January 2025 at the Kunsthalle Seinäjoki, exploring the nature and mechanisms of public art. Where Statuomania explores monuments, the compulsive need to erect them, and the kinds of things that art brought into public space celebrates, House Party! on the other hand, studies the boundary between private and public, and who owns public space and who is entitled to privacy. It reflects on what is yet to be revealed, seeks its form, experiments with the new, brings together unpredictable and potentially incompatible elements. Like the house party, the number of participants has lived and swelled, from a party of restraint to something that is impossible to predict. No need to R.S.V.P.

The exhibition has been kindly supported by the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Helsinki.