A Curse Called Home, 2023
A multimedia spatial installation composed of everyday domestic objects—including chairs, doors, ceramic plates, and suitcases—together with two video projections and an immersive soundscape.
Synopsis
A Curse Called Home is a multimedia spatial installation composed of everyday domestic objects—including chairs, doors, ceramic plates, and suitcases—together with two video projections and an immersive soundscape.
Visitors enter a darkened space illuminated only by the projected videos and filled with a low, distant sound that suggests creaking structures and subtle vibrations. Scattered throughout the room, chairs, doors, plates, and suitcases appear to have been displaced by an unknown force. At first glance, their arrangement seems random and chaotic, as though the aftermath of a catastrophic event.
One projection shows a ceramic plate being shattered by a stone in slow motion, revealing the beauty and violence of a single irreversible moment. The second projection presents an ordinary house beneath unnaturally fast-moving clouds, creating a subtle sense of temporal instability and unease. Together, the moving image, sound, and installation transform the gallery into a space suspended between familiarity and collapse.
Narrative
A Curse Called Home examines the notion of home as a place traditionally associated with safety, warmth, identity, and belonging. Home is often imagined as a sanctuary—a space people idealise, protect, defend, and, at times, are even willing to die for.
The installation challenges this idealised understanding by employing familiar domestic objects as symbolic carriers of social, cultural, and psychological systems. As visitors move through the space, the apparent disorder gradually reveals an underlying logic. The placement of each object is carefully determined by its material qualities and symbolic relationships, encouraging viewers to uncover patterns hidden beneath the perceived chaos.
Through this embodied process of exploration, the installation suggests that the systems defining “home” are neither neutral nor inherently protective. Instead, home emerges as a complex structure shaped by invisible rules, expectations, memories, and power relations. The work invites viewers to question whether the security associated with home is genuine or whether it conceals deeper tensions and contradictions.
Technical
The installation consists of wheel-thrown ceramic plates, found chairs, doors, and suitcases of various sizes.
One video is recorded at 800 frames per second using a Sony camera and projected at large scale onto a wall. The second video combines separate recordings of a house and the sky, composited and time-manipulated in Adobe Premiere Pro to create an unnatural relationship between the static architecture and accelerated cloud movement.
The soundscape may be embedded within one of the video projections or presented as an independent multichannel audio installation, depending on the technical capabilities of the exhibition space.
