In someone else’s bed is a multimedia exhibition presented at Artmedia Gallery by Violette Bule, a Venezuelan artist based in New York. She has displayed photographs, texts, a video, a map and other resources inside the exhibition space.

The beginnings of this project went back to when Bule registered her Brooklyn apartment in an online marketplace that allows people to offer home hospitality service by leasing a short-term room. For more than one year she made consensual photographic portraits of her guests, at the end of their stay, complementing them with short recorded or written interviews conducted by Raquel Abend, a Venezuelan writer. Bule also collected all the communications exchanged between her and each roommate, including messages and receipts. Finally, the collaborative duo traveled to Boston and documented the experience lived there using the same room for rent service.

The resultant body of work —fed with a variety of documents: some precise and accurate, others sensitive and touching— confers a central role to word and photography, the second one mainly through understanding and empathetic portraits. With these elements, Bule has created an artistic situation that operates simultaneously as a narrative and a discourse on new economic and interpersonal relation styles that have appeared in late capitalism. The exhibition, conceived as a wall installation composed of several segments, has its starting point on the advantages of a sharing economy platform. It has been generated in the borders of the current capitalist system thanks to the confluence of technology, new organizational structures of big companies based on online network, and individual initiatives. Rising from this circumstance, however, the art proposal emphasizes its character as a metaphorical approach to the construction of new human ways of connection and cooperation emerging in today’s global world.

About the artist

Currently based in Brooklyn, Violette Bule studied at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía in Mexico City and holds a Diploma in General Studies from the Centro Nacional de la Fotografía in Caracas. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Among other recognitions, she received the 2014 SOMA Summer grant awarded by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and the first price in the 18th edition of the Jóvenes con FIA Salón in Caracas in 2015. Her work is present in several private and institutional collections.

About the curator

José Antonio Navarrete has developed an extensive international career as a curator, researcher, and critic of visual arts and culture. His lengthy bibliography focuses on topics of modern and contemporary art, with emphasis on how media technology has affected and transformed art practices. During this decade, he has also exhibited his artistic work.

About the gallery

Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. With a location in Wynwood Art District, Miami, Florida, the gallery has the mission to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology, with photography and video as its core interest.