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Solo show at Stanley Picker Gallery, London

Curated by Borbála Soós

You welcomed me into your home in Tallinn, a large 113-year-old wooden house, poured us some tea from ‘Flo’s Teapot’ and asked if I wanted an official tour of the Flo Kasearu House Museum. Admiring the collection of your works along the corridors, I went up into the attic to visit the project archive, poked my head through a hole in the roof to see the entire world turn into an artwork, and borrowed a couple of books from your ‘Library/Bathroom’ on the way back down. You offered me the chance to use the slide, but I preferred to take the stairs to see more of the collection and visit the ‘Museum Shop’. We moved out to the garden and sat at the foot of the ‘Mountains’ you had built. Tallinn is so flat otherwise, you said, and a mountain view always adds value to a property. The ‘Technical Director’ had just finished a new cast of ‘The Monument of the Living Artist’ and came over with your baby, ‘the newest acquisition of the museum’. Your house museum is celebrating its 10th birthday, but it is a lifelong project. What are the boundaries of a house museum where life and work are so intertwined, and how can we represent this place, its context in Eastern Europe, and this peaceful district of Tallinn…
(Tallinn, Summer 2023, Borbála Soós)

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For Flo Kasearu’s first UK solo show Host at Stanley Picker Gallery, as visitors cannot visit the Flo
Kasearu House Museum in Tallinn, the exhibition presents various aspects the museum and the ‘fears of the house-owner’ through a series of liminal spaces.
Before entering, visitors encounter a sculptural window display with Sprout (2018), together with a collection of small signs, Party Next Door (2014/2023), converting the Gallery façade into a communal notice board of messages from fellow artists. Once inside the gallery lobby, Accessible Mountains (2022) represents the hills in Flo’s own garden, alongside a wallpaper depicting the museum’s corridor spaces full of artworks (among others Grown Out (2013) (photos in collaboration with Diana Tamane) and everyday objects.
Inside the main gallery, soap replicas of the house museum Soap for a Lifetime (2023), produced within the workshops at Kingston University, provide a lifetime’s soap supply for Flo’s home sauna, helping divert her fear of running out of soap to other worrisome dangers, such as that gap in her garden fence, her wooden house catching fire and public space being ‘parasited’ by order. A long section of the house museum’s garden fence divides the space in two, allowing access through a gap that is patrolled by a ‘borrowed’ museum guard in the accompanying video work (de)fence (2014). Overhead in Uprising (2015) aerial drone footage shows the building’s old metal roof being folded into planes that are dispersed around the exhibition.
Through the next doorway, a video of Disorder Patrol (2022), filmed on the streets of Recklinghausen in Germany, is presented within a changing room that holds the uniforms for Disorder Patrol performances staged to coincide with the exhibition.
Text by Borbála Soós.

Supported by Kingston University, Arts Council England, the Estonian Ministry for Culture, Estonian Embassy in London, Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, Temnikova & Kasela gallery,
Special thanks to Angela Ford, Aylish Browing, Andrew Chapman, Pablo Grattoni, Sebastian Nissl, Reuben Truman, Rosie McGinn, Tōnu Narro, Alex Stillwell, Stephen Umpleby, Alex Vine, Tat Whalley, Stanley Picker gallery team, assistants and the Kingston ‘Disorder Patrol’.