Book Launch

Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family

with Melanie Bühler

Thursday, March 27, 6pm
Café & Bookstore

Amant presents a launch for Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, published in conjunction with Kunstmuseum St. Gallen’s 2024 exhibition of the same name, with curator Melanie Bühler. Related to subjects explored in Amant’s exhibition On Education, Bühler’s publication exposes how rare the topic of family is in contemporary art. While feminist artists have thematized the roles of women, caretakers, and mothers, the family has been surprisingly absent. Burning Down the House untangles some of the crucial problems, beliefs, and contradictions that the family as an institution embodies and takes a close, critical view of family constructs across geographies, histories, and scales. The launch will include an introduction to the publication followed by a brief Q&A with copies available for purchase.

Amant programs are always free. RSVPs are strongly encouraged. Seating is first come, first served with some standing room available. Doors for Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family will open at 5:45 on Thursday, March 27 in our Bookstore and Café, located at 315 Maujer.

This publication reflects on Kunstmuseum St. Gallen’s exhibition Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, on view May 31 – October 20, 2024. The show brings together works by more than forty artists in which notions of family—and representations of the stereotypical, bourgeois family in particular—are problematized. The book provides a rare overview of contemporary art practices relating to this topic, alongside newly commissioned writing.

Publisher: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Editor: Melanie Bühler
Design: Sabo Day
Authors: Annette Amberg, Melanie Bühler, Mirthe Berentsen and Sophie Lewis, Annie Goodner, Helen Hester, Gianni Jetzer, Laura McLean-Ferris, Jennifer C. Nash, Kim TallBear
Artists: Jonathas de Andrade, Louise Ashcroft, Shuvinai Ashoona, Bobby Baker, Nina Beier, BOLOHO, Louise Bourgeois, Kathe Burkhart, Vaginal Davis, Adolf Dietrich, Rhea Dillon, Laurence Durieu, Marie-Louise Ekman, Buck Ellison, Christina Forrer, Maria Guta/Lauren Huret, Nadira Husain, Juliana Huxtable, Kyoko Idetsu, Mary Kelly, Lebohang Kganye, Ghislaine Leung, Tala Madani, Katja Mater, Alexandra Noel, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Niki de Saint Phalle, Ben Sakoguchi, Ju Sekyun, Sable Elyse Smith, Lily van der Stokker, Madeleine Kemény-Szemere, PINK de Thierry, Terre Thaemlitz, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Gillian Wearing, Ambera Wellmann

Melanie Bühler is senior curator at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland since 2022 and the incoming curator of contemporary art at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam as of spring 2025. Between 2017 and 2022, she was the curator contemporary art at Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. Recent group exhibitions include Burning Down the House. Rethinking Family (2024) at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Autofiction (2022) at Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Image Power (2020) and Noise! Frans Hals, Otherwise (2018) at Frans Hals Museum. She has organized solo exhibitions with artists such as Atiéna R. Kilfa, Jiajia Zhang, Anna Bella Geiger, Lubaina Himid, and Marianna Simnett, and is the editor of The Art of Critique (2022), No Internet, No Art: A Lunch Bytes Anthology (2015), and co-editor of The Transhistorical Museum (2018). Her writing appears regularly in exhibition catalogues and diverse publications. Bühler is the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship and holds an MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. She currently lives and works in Zurich.

Melanie Bühler and Ian Wallance, Burning Down the House: Rethinking Family, March 28, 2025.

Related Exhibition

March 20–August 17, 2025