Bond Fenster is pleased to announce Bara | D’Urbano, a duo exhibition by Tina Bara and Alba D’Urbano. Conceived as a home gallery, Bond Fenster embraces an intimate narrative dimension, where rooms and corridors are part of the exhibition and works unfold in dialogue with architecture, light and domestic scale. Within this setting, Bara and D’Urbano present a selection from their collaborative series Kunstwerke (2004-2006), including photoworks from CasaBellaArt and Die Kunst und das Schöne Heim alongside the video Kunstwerke 36.

In these works, a woman in a green dress (Tina Bara) performs a series of defamiliarised instructions for use, handling household appliances with gestures that feel precise but slightly off – an echo of Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) by Martha Rosler. Everyday objects are examined in terms of form and function, only to be emptied of their meaning and reimagined through estrangement. Rooted tongue-in-cheek in the cultural and aesthetic mood of the 1960s, Kunstwerke raises questions about technicism, faith in progress and feminism. Interiors read glossy, ideal, almost aspirational, until they start to detonate. Beneath the polish, a low-grade violence hums, routine as cage, care as labour, commodities as alienation. The housewife flickering between devotion and desertion and the whole spectacle teetering, ready to blow its own utopia apart.

The installation CasaBellaArt consists of six large-scale photomontages, produced in high-gloss photo quality and framed in polished wood, blurring the line between artwork and interior décor. The photomontages are conceived as artistic interventions within the architecture of the iconic Case Study Houses in Los Angeles, postwar modernist homes promoted as utopian prototypes for the way of living of the new American middle-class. Each image incorporates a text piece from Allen Ginsberg’s lecture on Meditation and Poetry (1993). These fragmented phrases, a sort of Beat Generation crack in the prefabricated dream, also form the basis for the soundtrack in Kunstwerke 36.

The video Kunstwerke 36 is composed of 6 segments, each of which introduces 6 household objects; 36 appliances of furnishing are thereby designated as work of art. The settings and backdrops, borrowed from James Bond films of the 1960s, are mainly by set designer Ken Adams, a legend of Cold-War aesthetics. During the instructions for use performance, the housewife responds to the rhythms and lyrics of Ide Hintze’s song okay, which samples and sets to music Ginsberg’s lecture. With serious humour, the sequences of bodily exercises are explicitly recommended for mimicry. Again and again, the tense doggedness of the performance leads to explosions, all so meditation can finally begin.

For Die Kunst und das Schöne Heim, the artists have re-photographed photo illustrations appeared in the homonymous (West) German journal which show residential interior design and architecture. In the photoworks, these illustrations become the environment in which the woman from Kunstwerke 36 can act again. The objects from the video reappear; serial, photographically recorded gestures advertise them in the optimistic style of the first tv commercials. The harder the performance sells consumer bliss, the more absurd it becomes, as the marketing gestures contrast with the second-hand surfaces of the objects themselves.
 
Tina Bara (b. 1962, Kleinmachnow, DE) and Alba D’Urbano (b. 1955, Tivoli, IT) work across photography, video, installation and performance. Both have been professors at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (HGB) in Leipzig, where they have developed interdisciplinary artistic practices centered on the body as a matrix of social construction. Since 2000, they have collaborated continuously on artistic, filmic and curatorial projects that intertwine autobiography, collective memory and critical reflections on representations of the female body. Their work has been shown internationally and is held in major public and private collections.


Opening hours
Saturday, June 6, 2026 / 6-10 pm
Sunday, June 7, 2026 / 3-7 pm

Artist talk
Sunday, June 7, 2026 / 4 pm
moderated by curator and gallery director Marta Cassina
in German