The Schneider Haus is a National Historic site located in Kitchener, Ontario, established in and around a 19th century Mennonite farm house that is the city’s oldest standing home. The interior of the house is presented as it likely looked almost two centuries ago, with period-appropriate furnishings and artifacts.

Through the summer of 2024, there was an intrusion into the well-ordered world of the museum. Toronto artist Kathy Kranias brought her exhibition Matrilineal Hauntings to Schneider Haus, and entirely upended its regional museology.

Kranias did all of this with only nine separate artworks, all sculptural ceramic pieces. None of this involved overt changes to the museum environment; artifacts and furnishings were not displaced in any significant way. Accommodation was made, and everything altered. Nine contemporary artworks were strategically situated in five rooms on the main floor, each exerting pressure on the surrounding period objects, on the individual rooms themselves, on the historicity of this place, and especially (and of primary significance) on the ghosts that linger here.

Now, of course by “ghosts,” I don’t mean something supernatural, but rather the “afterglow” of lives lived here 200 years ago, and, most importantly, the lingering historical residue of all the accepted norms of the period. So much of this had to do with how women existed, having few rights within the double whammy of the strictures of patriarchal British colonial legalities and conservative Mennonite religious doctrine and beliefs.

The entry into this is jarring; Kranias’s work consists of monochromatic sculptural vessels made

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