The Other Apartment


Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior.

Artist Bio

The Other Apartment is a project that occurs in two sites simultaneously as a collaboration between Pittsburgh-based artist Jon Rubin and Tehran-based artist Sohrab Kashani. The work features a dual site-specific space: an apartment in Tehran, Iran, and an exact replica of that apartment and all of its contents—using a team of fabricators, handmade reproductions, and 3D printing—in the US. For the past 11 years, Kashani has used his apartment as a space for exhibiting contemporary art and as an artist residency, one of the first of its kind in the country. When the two apartments are activated in the US and in Iran, The Other Apartment will house concurrent art ventures, producing exhibitions, programs, and events—in each case, every object, video, and performance that happens in one space is meticulously duplicated for the other. The Other Apartment functions as a series of theoretical and practical questions within the sad absurdity of our current political condition: What if there was more than one absolute reality; can you build a reality that functions as a loophole around national borders and economic sanctions; and what gets lost and gained in the act of that duplication?


Award Year
2015
Status

Completed

Jon Rubin

Jon Rubin

Pittsburgh, PA

Jon Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist who creates interventions into public life that re-imagine individual, group, and institutional behavior. For The Other Apartment, Rubin collaborated with Tehran-based artist Sohrab Kashani. Rubin’s other projects include Conflict Kitchen, The Last Billboard, …Circle Through New York, and The Independent School of Art. He has exhibited projects at The Guggenheim Museum; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Shanghai Biennial; The Carnegie International; The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. Rubin has received awards from the Arts Matters Foundation, the Creative Work Fund, Americans for the Arts and was a finalist for the International Award for Participatory Art. He is an Associate Professor and Graduate Director at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.



Events