LYU CHIRKOVA AND THE UNMAKING OF HOME
- Victoria Comstock-Kershaw
- 8 hours ago
- 5 min read
What can “home” mean in contemporary art once the domestic space stops being a stable site of comfort? Curated by Arina Baburskova, My Home Is… at Roha Gallery, Lyu Chirkova stages the familiar vocabulary of toys, furniture, and household surfaces as materially and psychologically unstable in an attempt to answer the question of what "home" really means.
Installation view courtesy of Arina Baburskova
There is a particular tension running through Lyu Chirkova's My Home Is… at Roha Gallery: everything looks as though it belongs to the vocabulary of comfort — toys, furniture, textiles, domestic surfaces — and yet, nothing quite works as it should. The exhibition stages home as something provisional, constantly negotiated, and subtly unraveling and in doing so, joins a wider contemporary conversation about where the site of the domestic sphere sits in contemporary art.
Curator Arina Baburskova frames the exhibition around precisely this instability. Chirkova presents objects that “appear comforting but familiar interaction becomes impossible,” foregrounding the uneasy gap between recognition and use. That slight but crucial shift from functionality to estrangement sets the tone for the entire exhibition: chairs, toys, and sculptural fragments hover between tenderness and discomfort, domestic memory slipping out of alignment.
Installation view courtesy of Arina Baburskova
The exhibition’s title and installation logic evoke an idea increasingly central to contemporary art criticism: the sense that home is continuously made and unmade. Writing on vernacular art environments in Envisioning Home, Self, and Community, Liz Rex and Christine Woywod describe home as a site shaped through material intervention instead of a fixed architectural fact. For them, home emerges through actions (decorating, modifying, embellishing, etc) that transform everyday space into a record of identity and belonging. Their argument insists that domestic space is a creative process, a place where self and environment continually shape one another. My Home Is… draws on this framework while dwelling in a more precarious emotional register: the gestures of making feel restless, provisional, and unable to settle.
After Home, 2022
The video work After Home (2022) sets the tone by extending these ideas into narrative form and condensing the exhibition’s concerns into a miniature allegory of inhabitation and loss. Shot within a dollhouse, the camera follows a small bear figure moving through intimate domestic interiors: close-ups linger on bathroom shelves, taxidermy umbrella stands, small, uncanny details that amplify the strange intimacy of miniature space, a fully lived environment saturated with traces of care and routine. But all this intimacy unfolds within an unsettling context: isolated on a snowy, tundra-like landscape, a shelter exposed to vastness. and eventually catching fire and burning down.
Chirkova points out that the exhibition reflects “a constant state of adjustment”: domesticity remains in motion, always under revision. This sense of adjustment is visible in the works’ material language. Objects appear manipulated, softened, bent, shattered and melted. The installation leans away from the visual polish associated with idealised interiors popularised by nineteenth-century women's editorials; instead, it foregrounds traces of labour, hesitation, and reworking. Home reads here as an iterative condition of a set of attempts, revisions, and re-tries. Speaking on the Soviet-era textile of Melted Silhouettes (2026), Chirkova reveals the work is a "reconstruction of a carpet from my childhood. It hung above my bed, and my brother, my mother, and I would spend long periods looking at it, imagining images hidden within its patterns. It felt like a world of its own. I created this work while in therapy, and working with plasticine as a material became meditative: repetitive gestures helped recover not just the object itself, but the state of perception associated with childhood."
Melted Silhouettes, 2026
If Rex and Woywod frame home as a creative act, Claudette Lauzon’s concept of the “unmaking of home” pushes the idea further into contemporary precarity. Lauzon argues in her 2016 book The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary Art that many contemporary artists represent home as fragile, fractured, and compromised as shelter, a space shaped by displacement, instability, and loss. In her reading, the domestic site becomes a structure built around absence that allows memory to persist - at least, not without a sense of belonging that resolves beyond one's own understanding of the sphere. As Chirkova explains, "What matters to me is documenting a particular emotional state. From there, viewers can connect it to their own memories and experiences, and perhaps feel something of their own." Seen through this lens, the exhibition’s recurring motifs of childlike forms, cheerful colours, familiar objects rendered dysfunctional read as evidence of home’s fragility in the audience's own psyche, and as a method for keeping that fragility close.
From left to right: Chezed House, 2026, Anxious Chair, 2025
The works inhabit a tension between affection and anxiety. A bright palette and playful forms initially elicit Freud's sense of heimlich ("intimate, friendlily comfortable; arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as in one within the four walls of his house") only for subtle disruptions to emerge: awkward scale, precarious balance, surfaces that appear softened or wounded. The effect resonates with Lauzon’s account of the “unhomely,” the uncanny as an aesthetic phenomenon that conveys home as a site of repressed trauma. Indeed, these objects carry a feeling of exposure: the plasticine dollhouse of Chewed House (2026) in particular reads like a domestic form caught mid-regression. The title cues the key violence, the intimate damage of chewing, gnawing, testing with the mouth, an action associated with childhood comfort and compulsive self-soothing. In that sense the work performs a bait-and-switch between the toy’s promise of control (a miniature home you can master) and a home already and irrevocably marked by pressure, touch, and appetite.
Baburskova’s curatorial framing emphasises this emotional ambiguity. The exhibition refuses the tidy arc of consolation. Viewers recognise forms instantly (the suitcase of Carry On, 2026; the rocking horse of Play With Me, 2026), yet the inability to engage them comfortably produces a quiet unease (Carry On is wrapped in power adapters, electrical wires and plastic, Play With Me is covered in spikes). That disjunction suggests a wider contemporary condition: domesticity experienced as desire alongside instability, intimacy alongside risk, familiarity alongside estrangement.
The domestic object becomes both anchor and evidence: a thing that holds memory in place while showing how easily place can shift. The exhibition echoes Rex and Woywod’s emphasis on material culture as a means through which identity and belonging are constructed, while also aligning with Lauzon’s insistence that such constructions remain entangled with loss and displacement. The domestic object becomes both anchor and evidence: a thing that holds memory in place while showing how easily place can shift. As Chirkova’s notes, “home is not architecture or a fixed address, but a sense of stability that is constantly shifting.”
My Home Is… is exhibiting at Roha Gallery until the 22nd of February 2026.