Steve Bishop’s The Caretaker unfolds within the eerie stillness of an abandoned domestic space, where time seems to hang suspended and memory lingers like dust in the air.   Produced in 2018 for Bishop’s solo exhibition Deliquescing at KW Berlin, The Caretaker is a 24-minute long film shot by the artist in a deserted town in northern Canada. After being built in 1981 to house workers of a nearby mine, the town was abandoned only two years later after the mine’s closure. In the hope that families could soon return, a live-in caretaker was hired by the local administration to preserve the streets and buildings, in what has now been a 36-year struggle to prevent the surrounding forest from reclaiming the town.  

The film is not only a testament to the caretaker’s efforts (who continue to mow the lawns, fix houses’ roofs and maintain indoor heating), but it also documents the presence of human occupation (lighting and electricity humming) against an encroaching force of nature.  The film meditates on the psychological weight of spaces left behind, homes emptied of their inhabitants but filled with echoes. Through long, quiet shots and subtle movements, Bishop captures the uncanny atmosphere of in-between places: neither fully alive nor entirely gone. The film becomes a study in absence, exploring how architecture can retain emotion, and how vacancy itself can become a kind of haunting. 

Steve Bishop (b. 1983, Toronto, Canada) lives and works in London. 
He has recently held major solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Osnabrück; Kunstverein Braunschweig; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.