The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Fall Visual Grant to Olivia Erlanger to help her with her project, tentatively titled “Appliance” to be shown in NYC in March 2023.

Olivia Erlanger is an artist living and working in New York City. Her practice spans sculpture, video, and installation. Her work has been shown at Kunstverein Gartenhaus (Vienna), Dallas Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, ICA London, Swiss Institute (New York), and more. She recently published Appliance (2022, Wild Seeds) and Garage (2018, MIT Press), which was co-authored with architect Luis Ortega Govela. Additional writing and interviews have been featured in Flash Art magazine, Pin Up magazine, and a forthcoming essay in Tank Magazine. 

Erlanger will produce a new video and installation, for this project. The video expands on her research into the histories of domestic appliances and the influence they have on their owners. The video follows Sophie Weiss, a writer in her mid-thirties, who recently moved into a house but finds it haunted and with a mind of its own. Door knobs rattle, the shower cries, the oven bellows, and the kettle screams. Sophie calls on spiritual medium, Crystal, to come and perform a seance.

As the film progresses, the audience begins to question: could it be Sophie’s aspirational anxieties or the psychological effects of fertility treatment producing delusions, or do her appliances actually have panpsychic properties and wish to communicate with her? Each of the objects makes its own unique sound, creating a robust sonic landscape of paranoia and anxiety resulting in a cacophony of unrest. The installation which encapsulates the video is inspired by the idea of the “​​Kino-Eye,” referencing an early cinematic technique from the 1900s developed by Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which predates cinema verite and attempts to capture the movement of a human eye in cinematic form. The project builds on Erlanger’s long-term research into the psychological space of interiors, its relationship to corporeal histories, and the ideas around an American suburban noir.

Olivia lives and works in New York, NY. Her first institutional solo exhibition, Appliance recently opened at Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include Home is a Body at Soft Opening, London, UK (2020); Split-level Paradise at Bel Ami, Los Angeles (2020); Ida at Motherculture, Los Angeles (2018). Recent group exhibitions include The Heavy Light Show at Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); The Kick Inside at X Museum, Beijing (2022), Shell at Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2022); Liquid Life at Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker (2021); Psychosomatic at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2021); In Situ at Marianna Boesky Gallery, New York (2021); Winterfest at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2020); Haunted Haus at Swiss Institute, New York (2020); DIS Presents: What do people do all day? at Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2020); No Space, Just a Place at Daelim Museum, Seoul (2020) and For a dreamer of houses at Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas. She was the first recipient of the BMW Open Work Prize. Erlanger’s work is part of the permanent collections of Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA, X Museum, Beijing, and the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Erlanger co-authored GARAGE (2018, MIT Press) with Luis Ortega Govela.  

Please visit Olivia’s Instagram for more information.