Each film in the Home trilogy finds Breuning’s gangly, oafish star and alter-ego, played by Brian Kerstetter, traveling to far-flung locations such as Machu Picchu, Paris, Ghana and Tokyo in a state of personal and cultural confusion. Along the way Kerstetter, who wears icy-blue contact lenses to reptilian effect, encounters local characters, finding himself in situations that are uneasily humorous. In Home (2005) the nameless character reimagines his life as a series of fantastical anecdotes from a hotel room at the famous Madonna Inn, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Home 2 (2007), which was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, follows him as he traverses the globe as a disoriented tourist. The third and final film, Home 3: Homage to New York (2012), produced with a grant from the Métamatic Research Initiative and premiered at the Swiss Institute, New York in fall 2012, tracks a raucous spree through the garish substrata of New York City.
b. 1970
Olaf Breuning's (b. 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, lives and works in New York) films, photographs, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited at the Migros Museum, Zurich; Centre d'Art Contemporain la Chapelle du Geneteil, France; Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland; SMAK/Museum of Fine Arts, Gent, Belgium; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; MoMA PS1, New York.
