A Guide to Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of “womanhood„ calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behaviour as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive,trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of one’s own narrative.

With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, ceramics and wood, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the „softness“ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction.