At a glance
Home becomes shrine, refuge and memory as Gema Polanco turns everyday materials into a deeply personal ritual space.
Why go
You'll see
Pace of visit
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Artlovers Tip
Look at the objects as if they belonged to someone’s private ritual rather than to a museum. That shift changes the exhibition completely.
And notice how Polanco uses the museum itself: Toda mi casa es un altar works best when you let the historic decorative objects and the contemporary intervention contaminate each other.
Artlovers relevance
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Description
Toda mi casa es un altar begins with a deceptively simple question: what makes a space feel like home, and what makes the things inside it worthy of care, memory or belief? Polanco transforms the museum into an intimate, hybrid environment where the domestic and the sacred continuously overlap. Everyday materials are reworked into tapestries, collages, costumes and talismanic forms, allowing the familiar to acquire a ritual dimension.
The project also deliberately pushes photography beyond the fixed image. Textile, body, performance and sensory experience become extensions of photographic practice, while the museum’s own decorative-arts collection provides a historical counterpoint. The result is less about looking at individual photographs than about inhabiting a constructed emotional space.
Gema Polanco (b. 1992, Valencia) is a Spanish artist whose practice draws on craft, self-taught processes, popular culture and material experimentation. Her work often moves between photography, textile and installation, using domestic imagery and handmade objects to explore identity, memory and emotional experience.
