This year’s Expanded Realities exhibition features five non-fiction works which use moving image practices in the broadest sense of the term to address the sensation of alienation from a domestic environment. These works allow viewers to inhabit bodies, relationships and built environments which have, each in their own way, come to feel like home and which have since been transformed into hostile and unfamiliar spaces.
Ranging in subject from a neurological condition to the politics of housing and the entwined ecological, indigenous and regulatory histories of Los Angeles, the works presented in Losing Home share this thematic concern of the familiar becoming unfamiliar but approach it using a range of non-fiction and speculative practices. Using immersive and interactive media including virtual and mixed reality and video game technologies, these manifestations of alienation come to be more viscerally experienced, and in some cases, embodied. Experienced together, these works ask the viewer to reckon with how we can come to find ourselves out of place in what was once familiar.
The exhibition is free to attend and is based at our Festival Hub at Rich Mix on the fourth floor. It is open from:
Thursday 25 April, 4.30pm– 7pm (private view)
Friday 26 April, 12pm – 7pm
Saturday 27 April, 12pm – 7pm
Sunday 28 April, 12pm – 7pm
Monday 29 April, 12pm – 5:30pm
Remember This Place: 31°20’46’’N 34°46’46’’E
Patricia Echeverria Liras / 2023 / Palestine, Qatar, Spain / 25’ / Interactive VR / English spoken
Made in collaboration with Bedouin communities across historic Palestine, Remember This Place: 31°20’46’’N 34°46’46’’E, is a space that seeks to preserve a notion of home in the context of the constant threats of demolition and displacement which communities in the OPT face. The collaborators involved in the project work in fields including activism, architecture and art in communities across the region and the project draws upon this diversity of experiences to document and digitise elements of their work, creating a record of communities’ history, culture and sense of belonging which can persevere in spite of attempts to erase it.
Small Acts of Violence (preview)
Aay Liparoto / 2023 / Belgium / 25’ / Interactive VR / English spoken
What actions do you perform in the name of love? What bad behaviours do you blame on love? We host a preview of the immersive cinematic work Small Acts of Violence, initially exhibited as the central work in Liparoto’s solo show at argos centre for audiovisual work, Brussels. Small Acts of Violence is a frank examination of love and domestic violence rooted in care for the viewer. Drawing upon testimonials from women, non-binary and non-cis male perpetrators of domestic violence, a central figure guides the viewer through scenes in warm, kitsch and fleshy surroundings which confront us with how acts of love and violence can become intertwined, as they might not be as far apart as they seem. A space free of judgements and assumptions is created to allow for the examination of past behaviours and to develop a vision of a form of love truly detached from violence.
Small Acts of Violence is proudly produced by argos centre for audiovisual arts (BE), co-produced by CON10UR (BE), V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media (NL) and supported by Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF)
With the generous support of The Delegation of Flanders (Embassy of Belgium) to the UK and Ireland.
The Alluvials
Alice Bucknell / 2024 / USA / 25’ / Video and multi-level game / English spoken
The Alluvials is a video work and multi-chapter playable game, one of which is presented here, that explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a Los Angeles of the speculative future. The story is told through a variety of nonhuman and elemental perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22. Using a range of media, including custom-built game environments, “modded” versions of the fictional city of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto 5 and 3D scans of the city captured by drone, the game expands on Bucknell’s ongoing research into how nature, ecology, and the environment are portrayed and interacted with, while also integrating queer gaming tactics and theory. The project’s combination of human, nonhuman, and machine perspectives proposes that the end of an anthropocentric world-view is not the end of the world.
Turbulence: Jamais Vu
Ben Joseph Andrews, Emma Roberts / 2023 / Australia / 10’ / Mixed reality / English spoken
The inverse of the better-known sensation of déjà vu, jamais vu is a condition in which familiar settings and actions come to feel alien. Having lived with the condition since being diagnosed with vestibular migraines in his twenties, Turbulence: Jamais Vu is the first element of an ongoing project by Andrews to recreate the experience of this phenomenon for viewers. The mixed reality installation distorts and re-orientates a typical desk space that the viewer is sat at to the extent that even simple tasks – picking up a bottle of medication, flipping through the pages of a book – come to challenge our sense of coordination. Equal parts unsettling and illuminating, the project translates a deeply embodied set of sensations into a form that can be experienced, and to some extent at least, understood, by others.
We Were Both Wrong
Nick Smith / 2023 / UK / 15’ / 2-channel video / English spoken
We Were Both Wrong brings together a range of archival and original footage to present a portrait of housing in contemporary Britain during a period of economic, architectural and political crisis. Drawing upon his work as a property inspector as well as his independent research, Smith’s project charts the ideological developments that led to housing being treated primarily as a form of capital and the impact this has had on the aesthetics and quality of the British built environment. In this installation the central video work is accompanied by a series of video “diary entries” which the artist will record and submit daily for the duration of the exhibition.
A selection of immersive and audio works produced by students from UCL’s Public Anthropology postgraduate programmes will also be presented on Tuesday 30 April as part of our UCL Public Anthropology Student Showcase.