Today, July 31, at 18:00, the Part Time gallery will open a solo exhibition by Australian interior architect and artist Maike Statz entitled A Table is a Wall, a Door, a Home, which focuses on the symbolic and political meanings of the table. The installation explores how this everyday object can simultaneously maintain and disrupt familiar structures — from traditional households to community self-organisation.
Maike Statz’s installation A Table is a Wall, a Door, a Home looks at kitchen and dining room tables as tools that can be used to reflect on the concepts of home and family life. Historically, tables in households have served as places for care work, often reinforcing traditional gender roles and heteronormative family structures. At the same time, they have also been spaces for political engagement, resistance, and liberation.
The work created for the exhibition continues Maike’s long-standing interest in tables as significant points in feminist and queer communities, practices, and theories. The installation explores moments of interruption and deviation, focusing on the boundaries between «I» and space. Here, tables are viewed as multi-layered, mobile objects — an experimental tabula rasa capable of infinite change.
Maike Statz (Australia) is an Oslo-based interior architect and artist working across curation, writing, installation, and design. Her practice explores the relationship between bodies and space, reflecting on how architecture shapes emotions, behaviours, and identities — and how these, in turn, shape architecture. Maike is interested in the practical, political, and philosophical dimensions of furniture and other interior elements. Informed by feminist and queer theory, she investigates spatial inequality and seeks alternative tools and methods for space-making. Fictional spaces and the imagined architectures of science fiction and fantasy often serve as references in her work.
From 2022 to 2024, Maike co-founded and ran the project space Nogoods in Bergen and the magazine Bias: Bodies in Architecture and Structures with Danja Burchard and Francesca Scapinello. In 2023, she curated Hosting Space at Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, a combined artistic and design project. In 2024, she was writer-in-residence with Contemporary Art Stavanger, where she wrote the article series Building a Better World.
The exhibition A Table is a Wall, a Door, a Home is on view at the Part Time gallery until August 30. The gallery is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 15.00 to 18.00 and on Saturdays from 12.00 to 16.00. Exhibition producent — Liene Pavlovska. Technical support — Oskars Pavlovskis. Artist’s assistant — Renāte Liepniece. The exhibition was created with the support of the State Culture Capital Foundation and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Viedokļi