Lavender House, 2020, 4k color video with sound, duration 24:08
“Lavender House” narrates the life of a tenant and her evolving relationship to the empty house next door, a rent-controlled building left uninhabited, held from the market by real estate investors. “Lavender House” delivers an embodied history of rent control, anxiety, motherhood, and resistance. Part auto-fiction, memoir, and psychological thriller.
Sarah Rara’s multi-disciplinary practice—including video, sound, writing, performance—explores the position of witness within fragile systems. Rara is a contributing member of the ongoing project lucky dragons (with Luke Fischbeck). Their work, solo and in collaboration, has been presented at such institutions as the Hammer Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial), the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, PS1 in New York, REDCAT and LACMA in Los Angeles, MOCA Los Angeles, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. Their first volume of poems “Earth Breakup” was released by Hesse Press Fall 2015. The chapbook “Chronic Objector” was released by Miniature Garden Spring 2017. Rara is a 2018 recipient of the LACMA Art + Technology fellowship. Rara is Assistant Professor of Moving Image at Williams College.
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