Outfits is a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Athens-based artist Iris Touliatou. Using framing as a practical and conceptual device, Touliatou’s exhibition at Peer comprises sculpture and a series of architectural and behavioural adjustments that explore the access to, and the safeguarding of, public and private space. 

Building on her previous work, with its interest in cyclical economies and the infrastructural qualities of objects, this exhibition draws attention to the interdependent behaviours of people and institutions. Hundreds of ornaments of guard dogs sit waiting in a museum display unit, an exhibition wall is undressed, a replica door installed, and an address manipulated. Each acts as an ‘outfit’, or facade for redressing a set of organisational and personal requirements. 

Touliatou’s exhibition at Peer takes as a starting point the history, location and function of Peer’s back door, which leads onto a large residential carpark, as well as her research into the building’s archive where she found descriptions of Peer’s location as a poorly lit site that attracts “antisocial behaviour”. Motivated by questions of what constitutes good and bad behaviour, security and perceived threats, Touliatou’s exhibition produces new sightlines and access routes from the front of the gallery to Peer’s back door. 

In the exhibition space, KNOCK-OFF SAFETY RETROFIT (2023) comprises a doorframe and fire door newly installed by Hackney Council’s maintenance team, mirroring Peer’s existing backdoor and providing a permeable access to the adjacent office space and a clear view through to the rear of the building. In PARTYWALL COMMON FIT (2023) sections of the gallery wall have been removed. In doing so, Touliatou draws attention to the architectural structures shared between Peer and the three residential flats above the gallery space.

Central to the exhibition is NATIONAL STYLE (JENNINGSERSATZ) (2023). Four replicas of the famous ‘Jennings Dog’ also known as ‘The Dog of Alcibiades’, sit among hundreds of statues and household ornaments of seated guard dogs of various breeds, all bought from UK-based eBay sellers. Mapping the mutation of objects and their value, the work takes the origins of the Jennings Dog – a Roman marble copy of a 2nd Century Hellenistic bronze statue of a seated Molossian dog – as a protocol for the research and purchase of all the seated dogs included in the installation. 

A museum standard Proform archive shelving unit mounted on a Monotrak mobile system provides a framing device for the objects and considers the legacy of ownership and care of the Roman marble sculpture, which is thought to be one of only a few animal sculptures surviving from antiquity. Named after the object’s first British owner, Henry Constantine Jennings (1731 – 1819), a colonist, antiquarian, collector and gambler, the sculpture became a signal of social status within the British upper classes of the 17th Century. Sold by Jennings to pay his gambling debts, it was eventually bought by the British Museum, partly through Heritage National Lottery Fund, where it resides today.

Combining her emotionally informed and architecturally bold interventions, Touliatou’s commission at Peer extends her ongoing interest in the conditions and relations that create behaviours that constitute social status – be it security, access, taste, proximity, wealth or lack thereof, as well as how we navigate relationships to one another. 

Text by: Peer