The sun comes out after five days of rain. Light streaks through bay windows onto parquet flooring, green skirting boards and marble fireplaces. It is Saturday and last night an empty house on the corner of a street in Tournai became host to an exhibition. Organised by Gauli Zitter under the name Parloir, the programmes of ten international galleries were presented through the rooms of the 1930s family home — Brunette Coleman, Ehrlich Steinberg, Fanta, Hot Wheels, Misako & Rosen, Triangolo, Sweetwater, Kin, Zero…, and Gauli Zitter themselves.
The domestic period features of the house remain remarkably intact. Porcelain sinks mark the corners of bedrooms, patterned wallpaper is combined with matching coloured carpet, frosted glass doors open onto tiled hallways. The galleries find a symbiosis with this environment, choosing works that are not necessarily site-specific but site-conscious. In the front room of the ground floor, Triangolo’s presentation of Daniel Graham Loxton features a mixed media painting, Untitled (Magiscule), whose collaged layers reveal the windows and wooden flooring of a room uncannily similar to the one it is in. Upstairs, the textured wallpaper of a former bedroom becomes the background to Irina Jasnoswski Pascual’s UV prints on glass, Dramatic events (still) and Rubbing 1, presented by Gauli Zitter. Details of open mouths and clasped hands are punctuated by the cross-hatched lines behind. Next door, Brunette Coleman shows Joyce Joumaa’s breaker box work, Sometimes Doher, in a fireplace, periodically lighting up an image of a Tripoli apartment in time with the electricity supply schedule in Lebanon. This work in particular, which draws a connection to another home, ties personal memory thoughtfully to the distant known past of the building.
Other works teeter at the brink of seeming functionality. Richard Rezac’s, Untitled (15-04), presented by Misako & Rosen, hangs in the stairwell, its not quite reflective aluminium surface nearly offering us a glimpse of ourselves. Bernard Voïta’s Jalousie IX is similarly mirror-like, its geometric aluminium panels unfolding from its place next to a bedroom sink. In Ehrlich Steinberg’s room, TJ Shin lines up thirteen pocket watches on a built-in shelving unit. Working with the existing display surfaces in this way, Pocket watches (United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Hungary, Netherlands, Slovenia, Turkey, Portugal, United Kingdom) feels like the vanity cabinet of a precise but hoarding resident. Fanta comes the closest to offering us actual furniture, with Noah Barker’s inviting orange bean bag work, Untitled (Bean Bag), accompanied by the haloed glowing light of the wall-based orb, Jellyfish.
The presence of domesticity is, however, inflected with the era of the building, so any homeliness also feels historical. As Tournai is known culturally for the Musée des Beaux-Arts designed by Victor Horta, it seems fitting to draw parallels to Horta’s Brussels home. The intricate hardwood wardrobes and decorative panelling of Parloir’s venue carry tinges of the famous Art Nouveau interior. With this in mind, the presentation of contemporary artworks is less like the staged home of some modern domestic gallery spaces and more like an experimental programming arm of a museum. The museological nature of some of the works echoes this sentiment, the birch branch and unidentifiable wooden tool of Constantin Thun’s works, presented by Sweetwater, reading like uncovered artefacts. Hot Wheels’ Anatasia Pavlou’s mummified paintings, Radio confusion Radio misunderstanding Radio contradiction and There Was No Longer a Fact Passively Submitted to, but One Assumed, introduce this at the front door, and it is echoed by Zero…’s Francesco Gennari’s discarded bronze socks, Ahhh..., at the very top of the house.
In some cases, this quality tips into eeriness. Richard Sides’ Another, presented by Kin, is almost anthropomorphic, a boxy human-sized sculpture covered in collaged images of mismatched crowds. It threatens to have moved position if we were to return to the room. TJ Shin’s Pinholes (Belgium, United States) showing two pinhole camera photos on miniature slide viewers, stare out from their place on the bedroom shelf like eyes, unblinking, watching our every move. And Marietta Mavrokordatou’s blurred black and white photographs from their under-the-bed viewpoint could have been taken by a monster reaching out to grab your ankles.
This ghostliness carries through the building, with even the more intentionally domestic curatorial decisions holding a sense of absence. Perhaps this comes from the house not having been used as a home since the 1980s, when it became a notary office until 2022. Any memories of occupancy belong to a time gone by. Because of this, Parloir establishes itself somewhere between an exhibition, a salon, a museum and a home, offering modes of display which are both intimate and distant. The galleries embrace this middle ground to encourage the multiple potentialities of the space. Today, it starts to rain again, and the house stands empty once more.
