With Apartment Portraits contemporary music ensemble Lemur and artist Ellen J Røed investigate the rooms we live in through a series of sound and video works for living environments, musicians, microphones, cameras and videographer.
Through a form of field work - based on video art and contemporary music - they explored three apartments in Oslo: This one is the oldest of them, a 1970s apartment at Hovseter. The other two are more recent. One is located on Teaterplassen in Grønland, and was built in the early 2000s, while the last one is in Sørenga, built in 2016.
In the resulting portraits of apartments, subtle and slow panoramic camera strokes through the apartments portrays the relationship between performed sound and living environments. It tells the story both of the rooms, their owners, the performers’ actions as well the videographer. As a combination of image, sound, action and concept, Leilighetsportretter is part concert, part video art, part site specific intervention and part ethnographic field trip in Oslo apartments.
Apartment Portraits is one of four elements in Samtaler om rom – Spatial conversations, where Lemur works in and around the at The National Museum – Architecture´s exhibitions on Norwegian housing architecture. As such the work is part of an interdisciplinary effort to explore new strategies for the presentation of architecture. It is developed within the research project Image as Site at Stockholm University of the Arts.
Stockholm, 2018.
moving image, video art, performance, materiality, technology, attention, sound art