Vacant, 2021 | Studio Will Kwan

Vacant, 2021
4-channel video installation, high-definition video, unsynchronized, colour, sound
Channel 01: Apartments make money (CAPREIT), 30 minutes, 58 seconds
Channel 02: Deep clean (Boardwalk), 19 minutes, 58 seconds
Channel 03: A repositioning story (Mainstreet Equity), 12 minutes, 23 seconds
Channel 04: Edifice. 16 minutes, 13 seconds, colour, no sound

The streams of détourned video in Vacant consists of found footage pertaining to three major Canadian real estate investments trusts (REITs): Canadian Apartment Properties REIT (CAPREIT), Boardwalk REIT, and Mainstreet Equity Corp. Together, these three companies own upwards of 100,000 apartment rental units across Canada. A residential REIT is essentially a corporate landlord that has become what the urban planning scholar Martine August defines as a “financialized landlord” by converting its real estate holdings into publicly traded stocks. This process destabilizes the “use value” of the apartment units, exposing them to the volatile “exchange value” of the now financialized assets. The videos in Vacant tease out the lexicon of euphemisms and rhetorical misdirection used to legitimize this corporate business model predicated on financial speculation and relentless efforts at maximum rent extraction. Financialized landlords speak fondly of “re-positioning,” “stabilization,” and tenant “churn,” code for a process that tenants and housing activists have long recognized as “renoviction”—the superficial upgrading of aging, neglected apartment buildings with the express purpose of displacing tenants to tap into rent increases not governed by rent protections. On earning calls with shareholders, financialized landlords brazenly celebrate periods of economic turmoil and social inequity—from housing shortages to recessions—conditions under which precarious populations are “churned,” forced to uproot and vacate due to economic hardship.

Exhibition history
Exclusion Acts, Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver, Canada, 2021, curated by Henry Heng Lu.

Installation view, Exclusion Acts, Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Vancouver, Canada, 2021. Photo: Rachel Topham.

Video still, Vacant: Apartments make money (CAPREIT).

Video still, Vacant: Deep clean (Boardwalk).

Video still, Vacant: A repositioning story (Mainstreet Equity).