ROME.- What does it mean to feel at home at a time shaped by migration, environmental crisis, social change and growing precarity? That question lies at the center of States of Uncertain Domesticities, an international traveling exhibition opening September 19 at the Museo Carlo Bilotti – Aranciera di Villa Borghese in Rome.

On view through November 8, 2026, the exhibition examines the idea of home not simply as a physical structure, but as a place shaped by memory, relationships, care, identity and political realities. After previous editions in Berlin at Haus Kunst Mitte and in Brno at the House of Arts, the project arrives in Rome with new works and perspectives developed in response to the city’s cultural and historical setting.

Curated by Alba D’Urbano and Ada Lombardi, the exhibition brings together around 30 works spanning video, painting, sculpture, photography and installation by artists from a broad range of countries and generations.

The project approaches domestic space through a feminist, social and political lens. Its point of departure is the growing uncertainty surrounding the very idea of home: for some, it remains associated with safety and belonging, while for others it may be marked by displacement, violence, economic pressure or environmental instability.

The exhibition draws on the thinking of Gaston Bachelard and Emanuele Coccia, both of whom considered the relationship between human beings and the spaces they inhabit. Here, the domestic realm becomes something emotional and cultural as much as architectural—a setting where personal history, social structures and everyday labor intersect.

One of the exhibition’s key historical references is Womanhouse, the groundbreaking 1972 feminist art project organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. That exhibition transformed a domestic environment into a site for examining women’s roles, household labor, sexuality and social expectations. More than five decades later, States of Uncertain Domesticities revisits many of those questions while expanding them to address the pressures shaping contemporary life.





The works move from intimate experiences of domesticity to much broader social concerns. Artists explore motherhood and care work, the body as a form of shelter, domestic violence and the loss of home caused by war, migration and environmental disaster. Other works address gentrification, housing sustainability and the increasingly urgent question of how people can live together in cities under economic and ecological pressure.

The exhibition also extends the idea of home beyond the walls of a house, considering the Earth itself as a shared dwelling and asking what responsibilities come with inhabiting a common planet.

For its Rome presentation, the project takes on an additional historical dimension. Two archetypes—the natural environment as humanity’s earliest dwelling and the Roman domus—provide a framework for connecting contemporary artistic practices with the city’s ancient past.

The horti, or gardens of Roman villas, are presented as places historically associated with otium, contemplation and temporary retreat from public life. Within the exhibition, they become a starting point for reconsidering the relationship between human beings and nature. The domus, meanwhile, is approached not simply as an architectural form but as a space where identity, family relationships and memory are constructed.

This dialogue between ancient Rome and contemporary ideas of domestic life gives the exhibition a particular character in its latest incarnation. Rather than treating the city merely as a backdrop, the curators have used its history to expand the project’s central questions about how people create, lose and redefine places of belonging.

Participating artists include Tina Bara and Alba D’Urbano, Ina Bierstedt, Frauke Boggasch, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Primarosa Cesarini Sforza, Kathryn Cornelius, Alba D’Urbano and Andreas Grahl, Maria Ezcurra, Inés Fontenla, Gluklya, Thorsten Kirchhoff, Maud Kotasová, Loredana Longo, Stefania Migliorati, Daniela Monaci, Cornelia Friederike Müller, Anguezomo Nze Mba Bikoro, Luana Perilli, Nika Radić, Suzanne Santoro, Selma Selman, Jakub Šimčik, Molly Soda and Anna Witt.

The exhibition is promoted by Roma Capitale and the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali and organized by Comitato Roma Radici in collaboration with the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in Germany, the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Casa Internazionale delle Donne di Roma and the House of Arts in Brno.

A bilingual catalogue published by Roma Radici Edizioni accompanies the exhibition.

States of Uncertain Domesticities remains on view at the Museo Carlo Bilotti – Aranciera di Villa Borghese through November 8, 2026.