Eva Bachmann

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The installation positions domestic space and everyday objects as sites shaped by movement, translation, and historical conditions rather than fixed origins. As you move through the interior, connections among architecture, language, and material culture are revealed as processes of negotiation and displacement.

With the narrow passage between the two tower blocks, I sought to reconstruct my childhood memory, where together with my grandmother, I used the gap as a shortcut to walk from one place to another.  The slightly smaller-than-life housing estate within the installation alludes to the peculiar way children distort the scale of their surroundings in recollection.
Upon entering the portal, you enter a rich interior that draws inspiration from my parents’ eclectic collection of folklore, ceramics, paintings, religious icons, and family photographs, combined with tangible objects from my personal collection.

The multilayered installation serves as a visual exploration of the complexity of transcultural identity through architecture, language, and personal collections. While rooted in a self-referential narrative, the installation extends beyond individual experience to address broader conditions shaped by migration, displacement, and the negotiation of belonging. Rather than proposing identity as a fixed or resolved state, the work situates it as a process formed through movement, translation, and accumulation. This approach creates a space in which personal histories intersect with wider geopolitical and cultural frameworks, prompting reflection on identity as contingent rather than inherited.

Kitchen

Rather than presenting the actual objects, the installation features life-size photographs mounted on foam board. These images function as mediated stand-ins, emphasising the distance between object and meaning and questioning assumptions of authenticity. By foregrounding representation over presence, the work highlights identity as an ever-shifting construct shaped by context, mediation, and perception.

Hand, Shoe, House, Fish, Hand, Schuh, Hause, Fisch

The interior is divided into three rooms, with one of the walls, portraying my parents' rustic kitchen decorated with a ceramic collection from Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Austria, Spain, and Italy. In addition to the objects, two fabric wall hangings showcase screen-printed cross-stitch patterns featuring words identical in English and German such as "hand," "shoe," "house," and "fish."

Displaced
Born into a cross-cultural household in former Czechoslovakia, my family fled the regime and passed through several countries in Central Europe before I settled in London in the mid-1990s. My work examines how language, architecture, and material collections shape perception and situational identity within conditions of displacement.

In the corner, a tablet is enclosed in a red retro TV, nearly identical to the one from my childhood. The looped video by Young Europeans presents a timelapse depicting "How 1000 years of European Borders Change." The video positions European border transformations as political regimes of movement and restriction, anchoring personal histories in the history of displacement rather than in longing for a mythical origin.

Living Room

This wall reconstructs the arrangement of my parents’ living room, presenting a dense assemblage of landscape paintings, Byzantine icons, family photographs, and small sculptures. Rather than functioning as a commemorative display, the configuration reflects strategies of preservation and concealment developed under conditions of surveillance and potential state confiscation. Anticipating the loss of the original paintings following our departure, my father reproduced them and displayed the copies, while the originals were rolled and stored elsewhere through informal networks of trust.

Icons

Embedded within this arrangement is a reversible image: on the reverse side of a Byzantine icon appears a socialist realist painting, also produced by my father in a domestic studio environment. The object was designed to be quickly inverted in the event of inspection, allowing the socialist realist image to serve as a compliant surface during moments of scrutiny. The work foregrounds duplication, reversibility, and tactical visibility as modes of negotiating ideological control within private space.

Sisters and Places

The family photographs trace multiple generations and relational constellations rather than commemorative lineage. They include images of both my great-grandmothers with their sisters, one of which is a drawing by my great-grandfather, alongside a photograph of my mother’s sisters and a childhood image of my sister and me staged in play within my grandparents’ garden. Presented together, these images function less as tribute than as material markers of familial proximity, representation, and self-construction across time.

The paintings extend this spatial register. They depict sites connected to education, residence, and relocation, such as the Technical University where my father studied engineering, a neighbourhood from my childhood town, and a Hungarian landscape. Other works reference places of temporary residence, including Prague’s gothic towers and Dürer’s house in Nuremberg, where I lived prior to moving to London. Rather than evoking loss or return, these images map a sequence of inhabited locations, situating personal biography within a network of movement, settlement, and transition.

Knickknacks

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On the opposite bare walls, I've arranged my assortment of knickknacks: ceramic salt and pepper shakers shaped like Amsterdam’s townhouses, a plastic owl, matryoshka dolls, a clay turtle, a red wooden structure with a small 'E', an Oaxacan wooden lizard, a yellow ‘O’, a Ganesha snow-globe on a mini-Euro-pallet, a fake cheese, a Trabant matchbox car, a camera, and a couple of gingerbread hearts. These seemingly arbitrary objects function as material traces of mobility, accumulation, and cultural translation. Rather than signifying identity as fixed or resolved, they gesture toward the multiple contexts, exchanges, and temporalities through which things and people circulate.

Part of the immersive experience is also the soundpiece called  Doppelgänger.