DANA MELAVER

"The Leftovers" was born entirely of an apartment that was broken down into a storage space in March 2020. For three years, unit #2070 in Brooklyn was home to early art projects, forks, and toothpaste: a neighborhood of practical and sentimental relics. For this project I used this stowed-away archive as raw material for new work, turning a mattress into a canvas, scrap paper into a projection screen, an umbrella stand into a musical instrument. By allowing these objects to change, I grant new life to the things left behind. Created during a three-month residency at Kunstraum LLC, the pieces traverse textile, video, performance, and installation. Following the residency the work was exhibited in New York City and then re-interpreted for a second exhibition in Berlin. In its second life, the exhibition highlights our attachment to material and immaterial objects of the past as we grow into our new lives elsewhere. Pieces from "The Leftovers" were also presented as a part of the 2023 Larnaca Biennale.

Both original iterations of "The Leftovers" were curated by Nicole Beck, without whom this work could never have been created. We are also indebted to Zeshan Ahmed, Jess Allen, Margot Bennett, Omer Berger, Tom Claudon, Luke Alan Davis, Mia Dempsey, Tim van Esch, Maya Jalon, Ian Krupp, Alon Lior, Merwin Lüdicke, Martin Melaver, Natalie Steigmann-Gall, Toby Perks, and especially to Lu Hain and Elle Melaver.

The works that comprise "The Leftovers" are:
Self Storage, a video performance shot in the storage unit and played on a CRT television;
Life, which brings back to life a carved out piece of a childhood mattress;
Attachment, Issues, a video sculpture in which video snippets are projected onto hoarded paper;
Wunderdresser which was later transformed into Box Spring;
Quiet Moment (The Cardboard Piece), which was originally made in 2018 and then was revisited in the context of "The Leftovers";
for the Berlin iteration Development of a Chair (Jack and Joseph) was introduced, after leaving Studio back in New York;
don't leave me i never left, a self-portrait taken inside storage unit #2070;
and finally, as a part of the Brooklyn exhibition I hosted and recorded a conversation with eight people about their relationship to storage. This was then installed at the Berlin exhibition, played with subtitles on a CRT television set, as a piece titled New York Conversation.
In both iterations, there were numerous objects which accompanied the works, such as flying clothes monsters, personal items, and auxiliary writings.

The piece Wunderdresser was an archive through which visitors could rummage. Pieces of mattress were transformed into plush pillows, into which items from the storage unit were sewn. In Berlin the piece was transformed into Box Spring. The dresser was replaced by handmade carboard frames from which wheatgrass sprouts. Visitors could come in and harvest items from the piece, to take home with them.