Ana Alenso – Vom Leben für das Leben
Kim Boem – Untitled (News)
Katarina Boeming – I am telling you a story, home 1996-2006
Matthias Breuer – Reconstructing the Truth
Olivier Delrieu-Schulze – Underactuation
Angelica Piedrahita Delgado – VideoRed
Sofia Dona
Carrie Kaser – Policy Makers
Jacob Kassay
Adam Laskowitz
Carl Lee – Last house
(2010, 3-channel HD video, stereo sound, 16:30 loop)
When I first moved to Buffalo, NY I was struck by the everyday beauty of the many single-family homes that make up the city. These iconic, turn-of-the-century houses seemed to have endless interpretation. Each structure with its unique details, angles, and arrangements was like a variation on a theme or an instance of an archetype, with its own singular history handed down from deed to deed.
At the same time, Buffalo numbers among the many rust-belt cities dealing with decades-long economic decline and its concomitant depopulation. As a result, vacant and abandoned houses abound. Thousands have been torn down and many more await a similar fate. Empty windows stare out from the last house standing on the block. They wait like a question posed, or a reminder.
If houses are containers for our memories, the structures within which so many minor and major domestic events take place, then each week in this city a collective amnesia grows block by block: a city disappears before our eyes. The demolition of these structures—by design or accident—and the speed, indifference and violence with which it takes place, the transmutations of scale, of space, and even of one's sense of time is breathtaking, tragic, and full of contradictions. Last House is an inquiry, part document, part memorial, into this changing built environment.
See artist's website for more information