BATH HOUSE
Solo Exhibition, June 2026
Klub Kocka, Split, Croatia
Curated by QueerANarchive
Bath House transforms the gallery space into a speculative bathing place, based on artistic exploration of bathing practices – from queer bathhouse culture, through Finnish sauna rituals, to contemporary forms such as sound bathing. Through an installation composed of archival materials, textual recordings, sound and soap sculptures, video and olfactory elements, the space becomes an ambience of slowed time and porous boundaries that invites shared experience and presence.
The artistic research starts from the one-day lesbian event The Pussy Palace, held at a Toronto beach in 2000. The event ended in a police raid, and the public investigation, media coverage, and the experiences of the participants encourage us to reflect on the politics of visibility, regulation, and surveillance of sexuality. Elements of newspaper articles and oral history transcripts appear in the work printed on towels, embedded in soap sculptures, or dispersed within the space. In this way, the archive does not remain a static document, but becomes tactile, audible, and fragrant. Something that can be touched, inhaled, and felt again.
As such, the work further opens up the question of the archive as a living place. Oral histories and ephemeral traces do not serve solely to reconstruct the past, but to create conditions for new encounters. In this openness, the archive appears as a place of speculation, resistance, and pleasure. Structured like a ritual bath, the installation uses hourglasses and the diffusion of scents to focus attention on the body, rhythm, and sensory experience, constructing an intimate queer space of community and imagination.
The exhibition was supported by Flanders State of the Art.
