Installation shot Installation Shot

Kaari Upson takes an almost anthropological approach to the domestic sphere and its contents. Her work examines representations and experiences of memory and affect, of decoration and disorder, of desire and repulsion. An early work, The Larry Project (2005–ongoing), was born when she wandered into an abandoned property near her parents’ home and discovered the belongings of an unknown neighbour whom she later named Larry. What began as a desire to fill in the blanks between the discovered materials was transformed into a series of works that wove a fictive narrative of Larry’s life, examining the conditions of viewership, intimacy, fantasy and domesticity.

For the Istanbul Biennial, Upson expands on her investigation of what the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong has called the ‘home-less object’ – objects for which, as Slavoj Žižek has elaborated, ‘There is no place … neither in reality nor in the domain of the possible.’ The sculptural inhabitants of Upson’s spectral and dreamlike world – discarded objects found on the streets, weathered and mutated through their expulsion – uncannily evoke the familiarity of the domestic and its seductive and unknowable inverse.

Also included is Upson’s recent video In Search of the Perfect Double (2016), which documents her visits to scores of 1970s tract houses in and around Las Vegas. These ‘cookie-cutter homes’ prioritise uniformity and affordability and are, for the most part, of identical layout and features. Upson offers them as a metonym for the American, middle-class, suburban taste for consumerism and consumption. Dressed in a short blond wig, plaid shirt and jeans, she scours each home, searching for twin houses, only to discover that despite their structural sameness, their inhabitants have left ‘stains’ that make no two identical. The work, reminiscent of a home viewing gone awry, unearths a dialogue on an American identity split between idealism and consumerism, the ghosts of the intimate and the domestic, and the true impossibility of finding a perfect double.