The Dwelling

The Dwelling is an exhibition that has been curated by Juliana Engberg for this year's Melbourne International Arts Festival. Bringing together 10 works, each an interpretation on the idea of haunted spaces and all that lies within them. A key to grasping the exhibition's intention is to simply understand its title; dwelling is a word often associated with a sense of shelter and comfort, but in old English ''to dwell'' was also to lead astray, hinder and delay.

In the American Gothic house that dominates David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's video installation, House II The Great Artesian Basin Pennsylvania, no one is home. Instead, as water gushes in waves from the mansion's windows and doorways, the house itself seems possessed.

In Chantal Akerman's The Man with the Suitcase, someone inhabits the space that shouldn't. It's a film about a woman who comes back from a trip to find a man in her apartment. He's not supposed to be there, and to avoid him she retreats into a single room of the flat. In a sense, her every movement is orchestrated in terms of avoiding 'the other', and all the pieces in the exhibition have been influenced in a way by this work.

In Sofia Hulten's Familiars, a series of photographs depicts domestic scenes, although with a twist - a chair sits in a room by a desk piled with books, a circle of smoke left from a just-smoked cigarette lingers in the air. The inhabitants are short-lived. In another image, a wooden chest of drawers sits in the corner of a sparsely furnished bedroom, a disembodied pair of hands hanging limply from the second drawer - is evidence of the splintered self.

One of the exhibition's more intriguing pieces is Canadian artists' Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Opera for a Small Room. Inspired by a collection of opera records the artists discovered in a small-town record store in British Columbia, each marked with the name ''R. Dennehy'', the installation is the creation of an imaginary identity - his living room. Stacked with records, lit by chandeliers and crowded with furniture, it presents a window onto the intimate space of another life.

The Dwelling invites its audience to consider how closely the architecture of the spaces we live in reflects the architecture of our minds. It's a translation of space and it has a real relevance to people and the way we live now. We need to think about how we dwell, beyond the realm of entertainment.

My favourite was the film with that guy stuffing a doona up his shirt and letting it slowly creep out again. Cool.