In an ever-changing city, This Must Be the Place invites you to look again at your surroundings – not as stable ground, but as an assemblage of past lives, memories and future desires. The exhibition takes you through the eyes of three practitioners approaching home not as a fixed site, but as a shifting condition shaped by time, memory and access. Animator and filmmaker Tess Martin, artist Nael Qurashi and architect Tov Frencken highlight multi-layered perceptions of the domestic – exploring its definitions beyond the boundaries of architecture. Bringing a poetic film installation together with daily urban notations and innovative street furniture, they each question what it means to build a home.

Rather than focusing on the stability of domestic space, the works trace its reconfiguration across time and space through their unique lens, whether that be over years, or across continents and cities. They reveal how histories accumulate within walls, how memory reconstructs place from afar, and how shifting vacancy structures the city. As a visitor, you will experience a constellation of hand-cut photo collaging, film projection, typewritten notes, mobile furniture, blueprints and homely interiors to walk through and relax down within.

Ways of building home

Martin’s replacement animation and rotoscoping delve into archival traces, where generations of previous inhabitants of a single house collapse into one another. Her analogue outputs are installed in a furnished domestic environment. Quraishi’s collages remain intimate and uncanny by visually and physically overlapping far-away geographies. Further contributing to the analogue, his type-written notes comment contrastingly on his immediate local surroundings. Frencken’s furniture turns outwards to the urban fabric, confronting contradictions of widespread vacancy amidst housing precarity. His self-constructed mobile bed, to be folded and unfolded, presents part of a series activating a geography of city emptiness.