Runa Islam

Space 5 at CAC Málaga is the venue for Room Service (2001), an installation by Runa Islam. The piece features two videos shown in a recreation of a hotel room. Visitors can either sit or lie down to watch the two short films, lasting nine and eleven minutes respectively, shot by this young artist, born in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

The installation Room Service features the recreation of a hotel room similar to the one where the two videos now being shown at the Contemporary Art Centre in Málaga were originally filmed. The hotel is simultaneously portrait, event and situation. In it, we see the two maids who star in the videos. Instead of working, the pair enjoy all the services they are employed to provide to the hotel guests.

Runa Islam produced Room Service, which is at once a film, an artwork and a performance, in response to a commission for a work based on a room in the Great Eastern Hotel in Liverpool Street, London. In it, the artist explores the idea of work through the maids' unusual behaviour, along with certain symbolic connotations that can be gleaned from the situation. Discussing Room Service, Runa Islam mentions both Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid and sexual comedies, or farces that attach such importance to the fetish of uniform.

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Runa Islam
Room Service