A site-specific installation by ANER at the View Room Museum of Art, Design and Material Culture
By Anna Biela, Ph.D
For the past four days, ANER has been recording a series of time-lapse films as she cleans, moves, reorganizes, and confronts the material possessions that occupy her living space. What might appear, at first glance, to be an ordinary act of domestic maintenance gradually reveals itself as an ongoing artistic performance: a meditation on possession, accumulation, consumption, and the psychological weight of matter.
The installation began with an idea planted in the artist’s consciousness: demonic possession. Whether such possession is understood as spiritual reality, psychological experience, or metaphor, ANER turns the concept inward and asks a more tangible question: What possesses us?
For six months, the artist has lived with a sense of fear and the persistent awareness of an invisible enemy. Yet through the process of cleaning, another form of possession has become increasingly visible. It is not necessarily an external force that occupies her, but the material world she has accumulated around herself.
ANER realizes that she is possessed by her possessions.
In Possession, cleaning becomes a conceptual and performative act. Boxes, clothes, objects, papers, tools, and the countless fragments of everyday material culture cease to be merely domestic things. They become the protagonists of an exhibition—a physical manifestation of accumulation and of the endless labour required to maintain it.
The work also exposes the paradox of contemporary consumption: we acquire objects in order to possess them, yet possession creates an obligation to store, organize, maintain, move, and repeatedly reorganize them. The accumulation of matter therefore produces its own form of labour. What begins as ownership can gradually become servitude.
Rather than attempting to defeat this condition through a final act of purification, ANER chooses to make the process itself visible.
The View Room becomes both home and museum, studio and archive, exhibition space and battlefield. The floor becomes a temporary landscape of boxes and belongings. Each object occupies a provisional position, waiting to be moved again. There is no definitive composition, because the composition is continually changing.
The time-lapse recordings transform this repetitive domestic labour into a form of durational performance. Cleaning is no longer invisible work performed behind closed doors. It becomes the subject of the artwork.
In this sense, Possession belongs to a long tradition of artists who have questioned the boundary between art and everyday life. But ANER pushes the domestic gesture further by refusing to resolve it. There is no perfect final arrangement, no promised moment when everything will finally be “done.” Instead, the exhibition acknowledges organization as a perpetual process.
The artist is therefore not simply cleaning her museum.
She is exhibiting the act of trying to become free from what she owns.
Possession will remain on view at the View Room until the process is complete—or until the artist decides that completion itself is an illusion. The exhibition will evolve as objects are moved, reorganized, packed away, or given new places to live.
The work is, consequently, never the same twice.
Follow ANER’s time-lapse documentation as the exhibition unfolds.
The museum is open. The cleaning continues.