You started crying because you found it and it’s gorgeous and you thought that, never in a thousand years, you could afford it.

A luminous space, with all the stuff untouched, to be rearranged. Upon entering, you are greeted by the open-plan living and kitchen area. The sofa converts into a bed, a place to sleep for two people. There is a flat-screen with cable TV as well as a fast Wi-Fi connection. The apartment is located in proximity to the city center.

It wasn’t easy to get it but luckily you’ve managed to move in a couple months ago and your colleagues helped you paint the walls white. You’re arriving at the metro station, back home from the office at one of the departments of a major company that delivers great products to its clients.

You’re attracted to customized solutions showcasing a playful combination of several items, prototypes and situations that both make use of and question the stereotypes attached to ideas of home, commodity and familiarity.

Certainly the concept of putting objects on display in a private room is a modest and at the same time common attempt to avoid rigid structures of institutional white cube spaces, existing within numerous galleries and museums. Furthermore it engages with the idea of inviting people to your home due to a special occasion, just casually, yet rarely spontaneously. The interior and items inside of the apartment can be anything, from carefully selected to purely random objects, that partly allude to a fictional host, who is leading you on; guiding you and along the way reveals some of his intentions via a specific spatial and installative body language.

Stay at home. This is where your job is. Technology made this possible, you lucky one! — says a leaflet lying on the table — Never set a foot out of this palace of leisure labor. No, you don’t want Swedish corporate products. You detest the smell of exploitation. It's not what you want to see. You are willing to bring on that extra cash for a more ethical and clean experience. No regrets!

Guest Rooms are visualized within private spaces, as an attempt to deal with and discuss the ambiguity of real lifespaces as potential art networking spaces; referring to an illustrious show Chambres d’Amis (Rooms of Friends) curated by Jan Hoet, that places art works within 58 private homes and “evades the overwhelming nature of large, prestigious exhibitions by cutting the museum to pieces and scattering it all over town” (of Ghent, Belgium).

‘The restful and reassuring atmosphere in a museum is partly explained by the explicit nature of its code. We know where to expect art and where not. Even before our first contact with a work of art, we are unconsciously influenced by the museum’s set of norms. There is, moreover, a dividing line between the events within and those outside the museum: on the inside the museum has detached itself as much as possible from all history, whereas on the outside, life and history are reigning. (...) The exhibition confronts, although only for one summer, the concrete, historical dynamic of an inhabited house with the timeless neutrality of a museum’ — Jan Hoet, “Chambres d’Amis: a museum ventures out”, in Chambres d’Amis, exhibition catalogue, Ghent: Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, 1986, p. 343, 347.

Guest Romuald Demidenko

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