Walking Through a House Where a Family Has Lived

A house is never merely a building. It is a repository of memories, routines, desires, conflicts, and histories. Walking Through a House Where a Family Has Lived brings together works by Mathias Weinfurter (b. 1989, Germany) and Are Blytt (b. 1981, Norway) for the first time, exploring how personal experience becomes embedded in material forms and how those forms shape collective memory. Installed throughout the interconnected rooms of DOD Gallery - a space built by its founders and marked by its own history of construction and transformation - the exhibition unfolds as a passage through a lived environment rather than a sequence of individual works. The architecture itself becomes part of the exhibition’s reflection on making, dwelling, and remembering. At its centre is Weinfurter’s Ankerstraße 11–19 (2023/2026), a reconstruction of the residential high-rise in which the artist grew up. Distributed throughout the gallery corridor, the work invites visitors to move through the structure rather than simply observe it. Beyond a portrait of a specific building, it reflects on architecture as a social framework that shapes everyday life, relationships, privacy, and community. By returning to a site from his own biography, Weinfurter considers how personal histories become tied to places and how buildings function as repositories of collective experience. Questions of construction and transformation continue in Angehörige (2026), where industrial and architectural materials are assembled into a constellation of found and altered objects. The title, referring both to family members and belonging, points to the social and personal histories embedded within them. In PF072305 (2023/2026), a subtly disrupted red fence exposes the fragility of boundaries that organise ownership, protection, access, and exclusion. While Weinfurter examines how built environments structure lived experience, Blytt investigates these questions through language, image, and painting. His works reduce language to fragments, repetitions, and shifts in order, placing words between legibility and image. Meaning remains unstable, generated through tensions between surface, rhythm, and structure. In the series DIS ORDER (2026), a single word is broken apart, rearranged, and repeated, allowing letters to operate simultaneously as signs and visual forms. This exploration extends into Torn (2026), a new series of bronze sculptures derived from twisted rose bushes. Reconfigured into dense linear structures, the works oscillate between organic growth and architectural form. Cast in bronze and reworked by hand, they carry processes of repetition, fragmentation, and alteration beyond the canvas while subtly influencing the rhythm of movement through the exhibition. Although Weinfurter and Blytt work through different artistic languages, both are concerned with structures that shape human experience. Together, their works examine how meaning is stored, transformed, and destabilised through the systems that organise everyday life. By the end of the exhibition, the house emerges as more than a physical structure: it becomes a framework through which experiences are accumulated, arranged, and transmitted.