Live With It: An Artists’ House Installation at Mura Ma

Mura Ma presents Live With It, an inventive exhibition – part visual art, part performance – that invites you to question the boundaries between domestic spaces and artistic practice. 

The curation is refreshingly unusual: 30 artists are each given 30 minutes to place an artwork and object in the space, one after the other, co-creating a metaphorical home environment. 

The space will evolve organically, dependent on the decisions of the artists prior. Only once the final artist has inserted their work will the viewer be invited to navigate (and dictate the meaning of) these divided spaces.

All objects and works are available to buy, and those that are sold and taken away will be replaced, meaning this creative curation will continue to shift over the course of the exhibition. 

At the heart of it all, the exhibition asks: “who gets to be the curator?” The main takeaway being that everyone is a curator in some respect – expressing yourself in even the smallest of ways leaves its mark on spaces, and traces the unique expressions of being human. As facilitators Jane Fairhurst and Nan Collantine comment:  “We believe that anyone who creates an environment, however small, be it a shelf, a studio flat, shelter or a house does so with their own artistic, aesthetic, and cultural sensitivities.”

Throughout the exhibition, Mura Ma will host events and activities exploring the concept of home as a place of creativity. Sessions will observe and discuss the practice of collecting and arranging the domestic space as an extension of curating, and explore how domestic labour and caring can be reconsidered as valuable creative capital.

The artists of Live With It are witness to and participate in the developing show – just as the individual is witness to and participant of their spaces.

This experimental showcase illustrates how creativity can extend and enrich the everyday. It’s not just a question of how to live with art, but how to live in it.