Nadim Vardag / Group XLII Apr 2016 - Sep 2016

FINAL PROJECTS: GROUP XLII

9/10/16 to 9/11/16

Schindler House 835 N. Kings Rd. West Hollywood, CA 90069

Knowing the way in which Los Angeles’s residential modernist architecture has been depicted in literature and films as uncanny and suspicious, Berlin- and Vienna-based artist Nadim Vardag purposefully staged that sense onsite in the Schindler House, the origin point of local modernism. Appropriating the famous opening scene from the film Touch of Evil, a legendarily dark single panning camera, Vardag confronted visitors to the house with an image of the site as one of trouble. Using a digital model of the house, Vardag recreated the scene at Kings Road via a video that played as part of his installation. The same unsettling sense was brought to modernist décor: a number of hybridized, fused-together pieces of ‘furniture’ made from manipulated household industrial materials were presented. The objects antagonized the furniture of the typical modern interior, in much the same fashion as Vardag’s video piece altered one’s perception of the Schindler House.