A widespread group show during Covid-19

Don't Try This At Home is a widespread group show spurred from the global impact of Covid-19. It brings together contributions from an international group of artists that explored the idea of artistic domesticity within their quarantine space.The room/house, as a paradigm of the human micro and macrocosm, has become the sole space of action due to the Covid-19 pandemic that caused worldwide lockdowns and isolation. The domestic space has turned into a vital impulse in generating creativity during the darkest of times. Thus, the private place par excellance becomes the performative domain of our ordinary daily routine.Antilia invited the contributors to challenge their innermost living situation in order to transform it into a space for artistic interaction. The same space also investigates, discovers and re-defines the domestic field as an exhibition venue. Our preconception of privacy in the past has a spatial and aesthetic transformation in order to embrace visitors’ intrusions as welcomed visits.Rather than focusing on the what has become daily monotony, we would like to treat our condition of forced quarantine as a possible field of experimentation of the interior landscape, ordinary life and expectations, mental breakdown, threshold of inside/outside, lack of physical contact and informatization of sociality.Each artist aimed at an original way to exhibit their art from home, literally a homemade exhibition set. Visitors peeked at the artists’ diorama by discovering the thin threshold between artistic research and personal life.The book features the work of CHIAOZZA (Adam Frezza & Terri Chiao), Dessislava Madanska, Esther Hoogendijk, Francesco Romanelli and Giulia Gazza, Giulio Bensasson, John Gatip, Jiří Kamenskich, Kickie Chudikova, Mary Cinque, Materia Ordinaria, Rebecca Reeve, Sofia Pera + Miguel Seabra, Webson Ji, Yuli Sung.Essays by Cécile Angelini and Gabriella Sá; cover design by Gökçe Varlı; project coordination and curatorship by ANTILIA Gallery.