arebyte 2019 Programme

Home

arebyte’s 2019 programme takes the idea of home as its point of departure. Reflecting upon ideas of redevelopment of urban spaces and otherworldly sites of discovery; the disconnection of marginalised bodies; new ecologies for future ways of living; and looking beyond locality as a means of integrating change, as well as resisting the homogeneous nature of corporate systems and challenging ideas surrounding labour, leisure and existence.

Continuing on from last year’s theme Islands, the programme this year extends to the peripheries, and comes back towards the centre becoming more personal. Home is relational, emotive, nostalgic and warm, but equally can be impossible, scary and unstable. The artists in the programme disrupt and confront the limits of what these situations mean in our present, our future and our digital homes.

Thinking about recent western-global political and social upheavals, the artists embrace and subvert technology as their means of interrogation, and posit new ideas to imagine our collective, prospective futures.  Within the exhibitions, spaces of home are unpacked as spaces of transition - of gender, religion, futures and reality - but also spaces of resistance and power. 

With an increased use of sharing economies, and the rising number of people working from home, our relationship towards the objects we spend time with have changed and as a consequence so too have the communities and lifestyles we operate within. The home itself becomes a consumer entry point for a vast new economic territory of invisible infrastructure of big data, with the monopolising of private activities to benefit corporate advancement as the overbearing approach. The rules governing the space of everyday life exist now through this colonising of privacy.

Through this questioning of corporate systems, political ideologies, industry and freedom, the programme ruminates on fact and fiction, on histories and futures and on belonging and alienation. The home becomes a metaphor for thinking about the future of our societal advancement, economic drives and consumer-led lifestyles. Home is a way to speculate on fictions for prospective ways of alternative living and thus acts a framework for enabling and empowering communities both in real life and online.