Cloakroom: Institutional

Cloakroom: Institutional marks a place suspended between the intensely personal and the public; an intersection where the private takes on a sense of the collective. This body of work reflects on institutional spaces and the invisible social assemblages that operate within them. Everyday functionaries watch over and regulate these anonymous holding areas. The unromantic and quotidian has the potential to investigate just how much intimacy organizes our experience of space and how we search for empathy in the most impersonal places.

Alex Hobba is an emerging artist currently based in Canberra, having graduated from the ANU School of Art in 2016, majoring in Photomedia. With a focus on the interdisciplinary use of photography, digital media, video, and sculpture, Hobba explores the construction of stories, playing on devices found within cinema, theatre, literature, and music. Drawing from this, Hobba is particularly interested in the use of language and genre as key devices for the communication and representation of information. Hobba’s work is rooted in the experiential world from various sources, be those personal or found within a globalized context.