Anti-Social Housing Agency

ARTS & HOMELESSNESS COMMISSION

Open daily from 1 July 2026 @ ArtBomb

KEY DATES:

1 July 2026 [Opening]

24 July 2026

27 July 2026

Anti-Social Housing Agency is a new socially engaged installation by Ciara O’Rourke and Jack Clarke, developed with ArtBomb in Doncaster as part of its Arts & Homelessness programme.

The project uses the visual language of housing offices, furnished tenancies, hostile architecture, waiting rooms, domestic interiors and showrooms to provoke discussion around the systems that shape who gets to feel safe, who gets pushed out, and who is quietly designed against.

It draws from the strange emotional deadness of places that pretend to offer comfort while keeping people managed: the IKEA display room where nobody lives, the council waiting area where time seems to thicken, the staged tenancy brochure where home becomes a product, and the liminal retail spaces where every sofa, lamp and plastic plant appears welcoming until you realise none of it is actually yours.

Through this, Anti-Social Housing Agency looks at hostile architecture, social housing, rough sleeping, temporary accommodation, furniture poverty and the everyday ways public and private spaces can isolate, exclude or control people.

At the centre of the project is a body of custom-adapted furniture by Ciara O’Rourke. Sofas, chairs, domestic objects and improvised interiors become part artwork, part social space, part uncomfortable question. These are not just props or set pieces. They are objects that ask what home means when comfort itself has become conditional.

From 24 July, the public will be invited to start undoing the room. To take this slightly cold, showroom-like housing office, part IKEA display, part council waiting room, part liminal retail purgatory where a sofa somehow looks both affordable and emotionally dead — and begin making it feel lived in. Through workshops, mural painting, shared artwork-making and other activities, the space will be gradually softened, marked and interrupted by the people who use it.

From 27 July, the installation will shift into The Social House: a reimagined version of its anti-social counterpart. Where the first phase looks at hostile design, isolation, staged comfort and the systems that make people feel managed rather than held, this second phase asks what happens when people are invited to actually occupy the room. To sit in it. Add to it. Talk in it. Make something there. The space becomes less like a showroom pretending to sell belonging, and more like a communal room built through use, care and presence.

Across the exhibition, the work will shift between installation, conversation, workshop and community gathering, slowly creating a space where people can talk about housing not as an abstract policy issue, but as something lived through bodies, rooms, waiting lists, furniture, debt, shame, care and survival and will evolve through the exhibition life into The Social House.

Anti-Social Housing Agency opens from 1 July @ ArtBomb, Doncaster.

Want to get involved? Email jennie@artbombuk.com