Lavender House: Sarah Rara

Curated by Asha Bukojemsky
September 24, 2021– October 17, 2021
Photography by Mario Gallucci
Gallery Guide
Spanish Language version of exhibition information

Oregon Contemporary is proud to present Lavender House, an exhibition featuring the work of Sarah Rara, curated by Asha Bukojemsky and produced by Marathon Screenings.

Lavender House explores housing justice within the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, through the lens of a female tenant and her evolving relationship to the empty house next door, a rent-controlled building left uninhabited for six years, held from the market by real estate investors. Lavender House delivers an embodied history of the tenant-landlord relationship, anxiety, motherhood, and resilience. Lavender House is part auto-fiction, memoir, and psychological thriller.

“Eight years ago, I began recording accounts of every interaction I had with landlords and developers, compiling a substantial multi-volume binder of photographs, notes, documents. I never intended for these notes to form the basis of an artwork, I was collecting evidence to protect myself and fellow tenants from illegal evictions. But after years of observing and documenting, I began adding poems to the binder as a way of processing, as a kind of power reversal. The work poured out of me in the form of a video essay entitled Lavender House, orbiting the tenant-landlord relationship, a minor history of rent control, and the violence of real estate speculation and gentrification in Los Angeles. Lavender House embodies precarity, vulnerability, loss—but also the solidarity, resistance, agility, and resilience of tenants who are the heroes of this narrative.” -- Sarah Rara, 2021

Lavender House will concurrently be shown in Mexico City from October 14-November 07, hosted by Aldo Chaparro Studio and EDA. Voiceover narrated in English by LA-based artist Nour Mobarak, and in Spanish by LA-based musician San Cha. Sound by Luke Fischbeck. Spanish translation by Blanca S. Villalobos.

Sarah Rara is an artist based in Los Angeles and Western Massachusetts working with film, video, sound, and performance. She is a primary organizer of the ongoing project Lucky Dragons. Her 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. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.

Asha Bukojemsky is a Canadian/ American independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Her practice brings together artists and audiences to generate critical discussions about the construction of identity in a shifting geopolitical landscape. Since 2017 she has produced Marathon Screenings, a series of salon-style film & video presentations, as well as public projects and exhibitions in collaboration with a range of institutions including: JOAN; 18th Street Arts Center; Active Cultures; Richard Neutra VDL House (all in Los Angeles, CA); Creative Migration (Bangkok, TH); Syndicate (Vilnius, LT), amongst others. She graduated with an MLITT from University of Glasgow and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal. She is the current Program Director at X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal.

MARATHON SCREENINGS is a series of salon-style film & video presentations that invites international and LA-based artists to share their work and engage in meaningful dialogue. The program includes films that range from short, conceptual videos to feature-length experimental documentaries, with performances, readings and lectures. The films challenge existing narratives, focusing on the construction of identity, decolonization, and the politics of memory in a shifting geopolitical landscape.