The Dwelling evokes the ghostly inhabitations of the ‘house’ in a series of works that explore surreal events, acoustic hauntings and psychological and sociological evolutions. Included in this major survey are projects by internationally acclaimed visual artists, Chantal Akerman, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, Sofia Hultén, Michaela Melián, Callum Morton, David Noonan & Simon Trevaks, and Calum Stirling.

Chantal Akerman
The foremost filmmaker of feminist cinema, Akerman has used the site of the house as a spatial interrogation of feminine entrapment and unrequited-ness. Her sustained and uneventful filming of details, lingering over sounds and actions, and banal observations of doors, curtains and chairs conveys a neurosis that is palpable to viewers.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila
Talo (The House) (2002)
This expansive installation draws on the five-part, single channel monitor work The Present (2001). Based on the narratives of women who suffer from psychosis, this film evokes a specific moment encountered during the illness.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Opera for small room (2005)
Cardiff and Miller’s Opera for small room is a tour de force of sound and effects. Their absent protagonist is evoked by lights, a gravelly voice, and the mechanistic theatre of record turntables, and shadow plays. The viewer is privy to the private world of some sinister hermit. He lives in the woods or plains: somewhere remote for sure. A wolf howls around the hut.

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller
Cabin Fever (2004)
Cabin Fever starts with the sound of a car driving down a country road, then a man’s footsteps, a telephone ringing and what sounds like a domestic argument coming from the cabin.

David Haines & Joyce Hinterding
House 2 The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania (2003)
House 2 presents a deluge, a biblical flood from the doors and the windows of a Pennsylvanian Neo Gothic house. This video piece continues Haines and Hinterding’s exploration of dwellings as sites of psychic disturbance, merging imagination and reality to create a surreal scene within a seemingly ordinary setting.

Sofia Hultén
Familiars (2007)
Hultén presents a series of absurd scenarios involving members of her family who devise menacing situations intended to frighten and unnerve each other.

Michaela Melián
Föhrenwald (2007) (English version)
Föhrenwald, a housing estate based in Bavaria, has a rich history that reflects the changing face of 20th century Germany. Originally conceived by the Nazis to house construction workers, it soon became one of the largest displaced person camps in post-World War II Europe.

This stark audio-visual installation recounts various periods of the site's history based on the accounts of former inhabitants.

Callum Morton
International Style (1999)
Morton reconstructs Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Farnsworth House (built in Illinois, 1945-1950) with the laughing, chattering and glass-tinkling of a cocktail party culminating in the sound of gunshots and desperate screams.

David Noonan & Simon Trevaks
The Likening (2003)
A young woman is slowly drawn through the interior of a luxury apartment by an invisible and possibly menacing otherworldly force. Eventually she arrives at her destination; a metaphysically-ambiguous encounter with her double, herself.

Calum Stirling
Calum Stirling is a multi-disciplinary artist best known for his exploration of sound as a tactile and sculptural media, and his leftfield approach to technology in dynamic contexts.