Ohm
Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, 2004
In Ohm visitors found themselves in a small, purple transit area. The back end of this room was covered in a wallpaper made of photocopies showing an audience that turns around and looks out of the picture, into a black mirror at the other end of the space. Along with a series of glass showcases that contain bizzare objects, spectators were thus caught in the middle, trapped in a situation of reciprocal observation, reflection and introspection. Various elements that had been freed from their original context formed a new, inextricable system in which different contents collided. This installation was the paradoxical result of my fundamental distrust of artistic production and exhibition. The progress of exhibition practice – from early displays of private rarities and collections of curiosities in the seventeenth century to today’s mammoth public art galleries and museums – should not let us forget that museums are essentially uncanny places.
Material: Purple and black wall paint, wallpaper made from xerox-copies, glass-vitrines, black mirror, neon-lamps, Japanese elctronic magazines, stag’s antlers, slide-viewer with found image, butterflies.
Dimensions: 3 x 4,14 x 2,86 m
Installation views: Thomas Bruns