+

 

I told Marta that each of us has two homes – one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalised in architectural plans – and that we live in both of them simultaneously.  

— Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night

​

In House of Day, House of Night, Qi Baiting presents a group of new sculptures, film and sound works developed since 2025.  The installation is inspired by numerous flea markets across villages in the UK; for the artist, the circulation of objects is itself an interstellar journey. This time, the artist occupies the space with a “space”, bringing in a house within a “house”. Olga Tokarczuk’s image of living in two homes at once offers a way into the installation, which holds together the material and the immeasurable: the located and the unplaced, the lived and the imagined. An intensified interiority and exteriority emerges, skewing the time and space relations of the everyday lifeworld and opening onto an “other” time. The objects remain tied to their lived historical time, while their decontextualisation allows other meanings to surface, as though they too were inhabiting more than one home at once. 

​

This condition of plurality recalls Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which meaning is carried less by heroic progression than by forms of holding that allow disparate lives, minor experiences and uneven temporalities to coexist without being forced into a single line of development. In this light, Baiting’s installation takes shape as a theatrical staging that re-chronographs time and space, holding open a field in which fragments of experience, memory and relation may remain in suspension alongside one another. Within the Chapel at Brompton Cemetery, this gesture resonates with larger questions of cosmology, time travel and a constellation of being, where material culture and spiritual culture remain closely entangled. Nostalgia here becomes less a longing for the past than a way of holding time through mundane objects at a micro scale, seeking hidden and often invisible conduits between human experience and the order of the universe.

 

Clocks tick softly, butterfly specimens hover

like meteors, globes rotate quietly, and chairs

bear the topography of use – each bearing the

imprint of place and human touch, forming a

microscopic universe within everyday space.

— Qi Baiting

​

This also introduces another question: what continues to exert a force after the event itself has passed? What allows the past to return to thought, as something approached through fissures, delays and partial survivals? The event leaves behind a dispersed material field of residues, objects and traces that have been severed from their original coordinates while still charged by them. It is often through these displaced survivals, rather than through the event in its immediacy, that the past becomes available to reflection. Like a beach after the tide has withdrawn, what comes into view is a scattered expanse in which shells, debris, rubbish, treasure and the vestiges of living things lie side by side, no longer held within their previous order and not yet settled into a new one. From within that disturbed arrangement, another order slowly begins to emerge through the acts of attention by which we recognise, interpret and care for what persists.