On Chewing Shoelaces: Art, Mess and Radical Kinship

What if mess is the method?

Here, art is made in the margins – between night feeds and school runs, between loss and life. It is made amidst leaking bodies and small sticky hands, in stolen minutes, in the gendered debris of daily life.

In a world that calls parents monstrous for wanting both autonomy and kin, On Chewing Shoelaces is a space – a rupture – where the patriarchal and ableist demands of “professionalism” and “productivity” are side-eyed.

It holds the gap between creation and care, refusing the tidy myth of the solitary artist. The exhibition brings together painting, sculpture, film, performance, collective experimentation, HOOD dreaming, a Queer Nursing book reading, and a FLINTA* play-fight night.

A co-working area is integrated into the exhibition setting, inviting all visitors to: sit, read, work, cry, fight, collaborate, care, radicalise kinship, chew on shoelaces – and perhaps, together, make this mess matter.

Curated by HOOD for Artist Parents Vienna