Critical Domesticities is a year-long research project exploring the domestic space as a site of artistic production, care, hospitality, and cultural agency in Belfast from the 1960s to the present day.
Call Out: The Living House Archive
Household is creating an archive of visual art in the domestic space in Belfast, and we need your help.
We are inviting anyone who has been involved in visual art projects that took place inside homes in Belfast, from the 1960s to today, to get in touch.
This could include:
Exhibitions
Residencies
Performances
Events or gatherings
Projects that happened around kitchen tables, in front rooms, back gardens, or other domestic settings
This research explores the domestic space as a site of artistic production during periods of major social and political change, and traces its legacy into the present day.
If you have stories, memories, artefacts, press coverage, photographs, or other ephemera, we would love to hear from you.
📧 Contact: info@householdbelfast.co.uk
✉️ Subject line: The Living House Archive
This research will inform a new exhibition and archive based in our forthcoming space on the Antrim Road.
For over twelve years, Household’s work has centred on how domestic space can function as a site of agency, care, and cultural production in post-conflict Belfast. Across our projects, we have developed an ongoing curatorial enquiry into radical hospitality, neighbourhood micro-histories, and the shifting relationship between private homes and public space. These questions form the through-line connecting all our work and underpin Critical Domesticities.
Much of Belfast’s cultural history has been shaped inside private homes, particularly during the Troubles, when public artistic spaces were often inaccessible, unsafe, or politically contested. In this context, domestic spaces became vital sites of artistic production, gathering, resistance, and care. Yet these histories remain largely undocumented, overlooked within formal archives, and under-represented in public cultural narratives.
Supported by a Paul Mellon Curatorial Grant (2024), Critical Domesticities maps visual arts activity that has taken place within homes across Belfast from the 1960s to today.
The research focuses on exhibitions, residencies, performances, events, and informal artistic gatherings that occurred in domestic settings during periods of conflict, transition, and social change. By tracing these practices, the project examines the home as a site of artistic production, hospitality, and social and political exchange, and considers its lasting legacy within the city’s cultural ecology.
This research forms the basis of an evolving archive documenting domestic art practices in Belfast, one that seeks to make visible histories that have often remained private, fragile, or unrecorded.
The Living House is a new collaboration between Household and MMAS Architects, centred on inhabiting and re-animating a Victorian end-of-terrace house in North Belfast.
Alongside MMAS’s socially engaged, community-focused architectural practice, Household will establish an artist residency programme and a living archive that connects the creative potential of the domestic with Belfast’s past, present, and future.