This is the House that Jack Built

The English folk tale ‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is reimagined, dismantled and rebuilt to complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed and structures reclaimed for repair as the artists form representative rifts, inserting postcolonial stories into nationalistic ones.

Through a plethora of portable relics, artefacts, ‘functioning’ and ‘function-less’ objects, the exhibition forms ‘Jack’s House’ filled with an inventory of memorabilia and collectibles that create tangible and intangible narratives of  contemporary British life. Confronting modes of ‘Ornamentalism’ and assumed definitions of “exhibition”, “curator”, “artist”, “audience”, “community” and “home”, the space is reconfigured through a variety of mediums.

‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is a vivid retelling of those stories, myths, legacies and folklores from the official voice that fail the diverse voices that make up Britain today.

Storytelling here is self-defence, is disorder, is radical disobedience.

If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard

No Man’s Land

No Man’s Land is a community collective dedicated to questioning the construct, culture, and material of the mixed diasporic experience. Founded by curators and artists Eleanor Sanghara (b.1998, British-Punjabi) and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ (b.1999, British-Thai), No Man’s Land rallies to establish greater transparency, safer spaces and a more supportive community for those obliged to disclaim their identities through a lens of social assumption, exile and Anglonormativity. For those othered in straddling multiple worlds. 

Destabilising dirty words like “miscegenation” and “half-caste”, No Man’s Land works across diverse institutions, organisations and communities to bring to the surface stories of intimacy, grief, cultural trauma, entanglement, family, and love.

@n.m.land

This is the House that Jack Built is a space where the general public, the cultural worker and the artist can all meet and build a language of representation. With a decolonial approach to event-making, this space aims to strengthen bonds, transcultural ties, solidify identities, and carve out new ones.

Aspects of representation, homeland, cultural, and social identity will be explored and brought to new light through artist-led workshops and performances running throughout the duration of the show.

Visitors are invited to take home with them excerpts, articles and writings, with opportunities for discussion in the exhibition space with the curators and artists around how such material reflects the transnationalism of our contemporary moment.