Apartment by Marina Roy is a expansive animation loosely inspired by Georges Perec's 1978 novel, La Vie Mode D'emploi, in which the author takes us through each room of an apartment building in Paris, following the pattern of the knight's move in chess. Roy, after Perec, transforms this structure to weave intersecting images of indulgence and dreaming, chaos, illness, and transgression. Wild plants and animals take over the slowly deteriorating rooms as the residents, and indeed the whole space, succumb to a mysterious virus.

Credits: Marina Roy Apartment (2008) 56’
Sound by Graham Meisner
Assistant editing by Abbas Akhavan

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Artist Bio
Vancouver-based artist Marina Roy works across a variety of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, animation and video, to find new ways of visualizing the unconscious mind. She has exhibited her work across Canada, as well as in Europe and the United States. Also a prolific writer, Roy’s book Sign After the X was published by Arsenal Pulp Press and Artspeak in 2001, and is now an art.net collaboration with David Clark and Graham Meisner, www.signafterthex.net. Marina Roy is an assistant professor of visual arts in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia. In the spring of 2010 she won the VIVA Award, BC’s largest visual art award. Curator Kika Thorne is a sculptor currently living in Berlin. She spent the last two and a half years in Vancouver curating at VIVO Media Arts Centre, where she helped redefine the architecture and political direction of the institution. Her curatorial experiments include P0L1T1C, More Enlightenment and VIVO’s collective anti-Olympic project, Safe Assembly. A silkscreen of her critical essay about Apartment and non-human materiality will be available at the screening. The limited edition print is to be produced using local organic vegetable compost as ink.