contemporary art installation exhibit project art-objects
plywood, cord light on battery, 110×40×40 cm
House of Chaos is an interactive art object — a weeble-like house that wobbles out of its illusory stability at the viewer’s touch. Just a gentle push or pull on the pipe, and chaos is set in motion.
Its skeletal frame is cut from raw plywood: no walls, only facades and a roof. This unfinished presence dismantles the familiar association of "home" with safety, stability, or enclosure. The viewer’s interaction becomes a subtle yet inevitable trigger: instability is not imposed, but activated. Chaos is no longer accidental — it is something we enter into, cause, and experience.
Its skeletal frame is cut from raw plywood: no walls, only facades and a roof. This unfinished presence dismantles the familiar association of "home" with safety, stability, or enclosure. The viewer’s interaction becomes a subtle yet inevitable trigger: instability is not imposed, but activated. Chaos is no longer accidental — it is something we enter into, cause, and experience.
House of Chaos, 2025
The house is built with a rounded base, so it rocks like a roly-poly toy or a rocking chair. A light push on the roof or a pull on the pipe is enough to tip it into motion. As it sways, the house creaks unpredictably, echoing the sound of a clock’s pendulum.
Inside hangs a small battery-powered bulb: to switch it on, the viewer has to tug the cord. In darkness, the swaying structure makes the light scatter across surfaces, while the bulb itself swings in its own rhythm — sometimes even slipping beyond the house’s frame.
Inside hangs a small battery-powered bulb: to switch it on, the viewer has to tug the cord. In darkness, the swaying structure makes the light scatter across surfaces, while the bulb itself swings in its own rhythm — sometimes even slipping beyond the house’s frame.
House of Chaos can be shown as a single object or as a group of houses, connected by cables and adapted to different scales and spatial formats. In this constellation, each house sways at its own rhythm, producing sound or pulsing light in response to the viewer’s touch. Instability becomes contagious: passed from one structure to another, it unfolds as a chain of chaos.
Exhibition Design:
This project is also a dialogue across generations — a collaboration with my father, an amateur woodworker and builder. He cut the plywood pieces for the frame and shipped them from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where I assembled the house. In this way, chaos is passed on not only as a theme, but as a process: something shared, rebuilt, and kept in motion.
Behind the Work:
*Special thanks and all my love to my dad, Ilya Yanson. It was such a joy to pull you into my world of art. Cheers to our very first collaboration — thank you for bringing to life what once seemed like a wild, impossible idea. Together, we built chaos!