An emerging field of knowledge that is both inter-disciplinary and multi-scalar, domesticity is deeply entangled with identities and identity markers such as those of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, and how they intersect with a space. Facilitating and arbitrating the relationships between material, mental, and socio-cultural elements, the study of domesticity goes beyond being a functional analysis of the affective layer of a specific form of build environment to encompass both the performative aspects of bodies in space as well as the various spatial and discursive practices that can/will engage these bodies on multiple fronts, in domains from public policy to media representation.

Using its namesake—a traditional children’s game where the players assume the roles of a nuclear family and make-believe various domestic scenarios—as a point-of-departure, Playing House seeks to utilise domesticity as a critical lens through which notions of home, situated-ness, and occupancy can be examined in the Southeast Asian context, and explore how the domestic context remains as constrained to broader public imaginings even if it appears as a private space. Comprising installations, performance, photographs, and films, the exhibition, which manifests spatially as a literal apartment unit, explores different elements of a traditional spatial conception of a home, a notion that bears great relevance in the current context of a global pandemic which necessitates homebounded-ness.