In This House (2020)
In This House is a locative media project commissioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Designed to expand audience interaction with art, space, and performance, the project featured four video stories embedded in QR codes placed throughout Albright-Knox Northland. Visitors could access the videos on their smartphones while moving through an exhibition by New York–based artist Heather Hart.
Hart’s installation, a life-sized rooftop structure, served as both the physical setting and conceptual foundation for the project. The videos explored the relationship between body and architecture through performances by dancer Naila Ansari, filmed during the conceptualization and construction of the rooftop. Organized around ideas of interiority and exteriority, the stories created a layered experience of place, movement, and narrative.
Each video was linked to a specific location around the installation, allowing visitors to access performances that responded directly to the structure and its surroundings. This locative format encouraged movement and exploration while connecting the installation, its construction process, and Ansari’s recorded performance. Through mobile technology and multimedia storytelling, In This House framed space as a dynamic, relational, and participatory process. The project brought together the material presence of Hart’s architectural installation, the temporal and embodied qualities of Ansari’s performance, and the audience’s movement through the exhibition in order to unfold the relationship among body, architecture, technology, and place.
credits:
concept and art direction: Maryam Muliaee
videography and code: Mani Mehrvarz
performance: Naila Ansari
music: Curtis Lovell
