Lavender House, 2020, 4k color video with sound, duration 24:08
“Lavender House” narrates the life of a tenant and her evolving relationship to the empty house next door, a rent-controlled building left uninhabited, held from the market by real estate investors. “Lavender House” delivers an embodied history of rent control, anxiety, motherhood, and resistance. Part auto-fiction, memoir, and psychological thriller.
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice— including video, sound, performance, and writing— explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Their work in sound and moving image considers gender, queerness, technology, disability, and illness, in connection with environmental research. Regarding the environment as relational and invested with notions of identity, Sarah Rara’s work considers the socio-political and personal dimensions of sensing technologies. They are a primary organizer of the ongoing project lucky dragons. Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Hammer Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and Human Resources in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14 in Athens, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship and current artist-in-residence at Bangkok 1899, Bangkok, Thailand. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.
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