João Maria Gusmão’s Bedrooms(2024) presents a haunting collection of bedroom arrangements, captured as they were found by the artist in a sprawling furniture megastore in central Portugal. These meticulously staged yet strangely lifeless interiors evoke an eerie sense of temporal and spatial dislocation. The store, having preserved its showroom displays and catalog offerings since its inauguration in the early 1970s, becomes a labyrinth of stylized kitsch, where outdated and futuristic memorabilia coexist in unsettling harmony.
Gusmão’s work subtly exposes the paradoxes of private and public spaces, emphasizing the commodified estrangement of domestic intimacy. The bedrooms, at times resembling space pods or uncanny museum dioramas, exude a melancholic retro-futurism—places seemingly designed for sleep yet inhabited only by ghosts. The spectral nature of these images hints at a broader commentary on the domestication of human life, where personal sanctuaries are reduced to standardized, mass-produced fantasies of comfort.
Simultaneously nostalgic and alienating, Bedrooms transforms familiar environments into surreal dreamscapes, where time collapses, and the notion of home becomes an uncannys pectacle.
