Current:

Tote Räume / Dead Spaces, West Den Haag (former American Embassy), Den Haag, Netherlands, Curator: Marie-José Sondeijker (Solo) (Cat)

29.08.2020 - 06.12.2020

Opening: 29.08.2020, 7:00 p.m.
Location: West Den Haag in the former American Embassy, Lange Voorhout 102, The Hague

DARK ROOM (No. 2)
Edinburgh 2013, room within a room, metalboards on a construction made of steel, wooden floor, 2 doors, 1 lamp, black regupol on the floor, brown walls and ceiling, detached (590x370x215cm (LxWxH)), SÜßER DUFT, Summerhall, Edinburgh, Great Britain 02.08.2013-31.08.2013
© Gregor Schneider / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

West Den Haag is thrilled to announce Tote Räume (Dead Spaces), Gregor Schneider‘s first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Acknowledged as a groundbreaking artistic proposition, Schneider’s work can be regarded also as prophetic in a time of mandatory social distancing since it is based on mechanisms of physical isolation. Unfolding a sequence of rooms, sculptures, human figures, photos and videos spanning four decades of radical art making, the exhibition is arranged in response to, and exchange with, the interior architecture of West Den Haag and the original function of its building as the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands from 1959 until 2018.

A clear example to this exchange is the 2006 Interrogation Room – a pristine room replicating one of the prison cell modules in Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, the U.S. detention facility located on Cuba’s southeastern coast. When incorporated into the setting of West Den Haag Interrogation Room exceeds the boundaries of the aesthetic field and acquires the status of a real authoritarian space, outlining the exercise of power over the visitors and the potential violation of their bodily sovereignty. It is no longer a mere replica but an extension of an inaccesible extraterritorial space (Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp) installed inside what used to be an inaccesible extraterritorial space (the U.S. Embassy in the Netherlands), rendering their hidden structure publicly visible and visitable and undermines the power of the state seeking to maintain their obscurity.

Also included in the current sequence is Cold Storage Cell (2007), which joins Interrogation Room to politically contextualize Schneider’s continuous experiments in sensory deprivation and practices of stealth interrogation and clean torture, intermittently conducted throughout his entire oeuvre, and in particular since the total exhibitions 4538KM (2006) and Weisse Folter (White Torture) (2007), where the two rooms were originally shown together.

A separate section in the exhibition is dedicated to Geburtshaus Goebbels (Birth-House Goebbels) (2014), which involves the actual building in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt where Joseph Goebbels — the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany — was born. In Geburtshaus Goebbels Schneider traces the roots of Nazi history almost literally, uncovering the physical foundations of Goebbels’ birthplace—the origins of his origins. After he purchased the property, Schneider began to destroy the building from within. He dismantled and eliminated all its architectural elements, up to the point where the house’s skeleton was revealed, exposing the constituent parts that were already there when Goebbels was born, engendering a true overlap between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘there and then’. To conclude his intervention, Schneider stacked the ruins of Goebbels’ birthplace in a truck that drove all the way to Warsaw, eventually parking in front of Zachęta – National Gallery of Art during the opening days of his 2014 unsubscribe exhibition, as if it were a gigantic open casket.

Within Schneider’s universe Geburtshaus Goebbels is also a follower of Haus u r (House u r) (1985 - today), the artist’s own site of origin, standing a short distance away from it. Haus u r is the name Schneider gave to the abandoned residential building in his hometown Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, which he occupied from 1985 until 2001, all the while ceaselessly reconstructing its inner structure as an idiosyncratic typology of visceral rooms built inside the house’s preexisting rooms (with windows in front of windows, walls in front of walls, etc.). Being realized through a process of self-consuming duplication — whereby each room is also the concealed room into which it was inserted, and the space — the difference — between them — made Haus u r an enduring experience of cognitive dissonance, a contradictory state of things, in relation to which presence and absence, construction and elimination, are no longer distinguishable from one another.

Text: Ory Dessau

Curator: Marie-José Sondeijker

Please join us for the opening of the first solo exhibition of Gregor Schneider in the Netherlands by Rein Wolfs (director Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam).
Saturday 29 August 2020 from 19:00 to 23:00 H. Entrance is free, a reservation is required email: theo@westdenhaag.nl

More info: http://www.westdenhaag.nl/exhibitions/20_06_Gregor_Schneider

Kreuzweg, Logroño’s International Architecture and Design Festival, Logroño, Spain

03.09.2020 - 06.09.2020

(graphic elaboration) Kreuzweg / Way of the cross (based on an idea for Berlin in 2006)
Logroño’s International Architecture and Design Festival, Logroño, Spain 03.09.2020 - 06.09.2020n

Kreuzweg (Way of the Cross) is a dark black passageway in the shape of a cross. The cross-shaped structure has four openings, one in each of its ends, through which the viewer can enter and exit. The shape of the cross is fully obtainable only from an aerial, God-like point of view. Upon entering the passageway, the viewer loses the formal contour of the structure, as the contour of his/her own body becomes blurred, melting into the indefinite blackness surrounding it, in which the distinction between one’s own outer/physical and inner/psychological space is no longer clear.

Obviously, Kreuzweg bears a direct reference to the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Rather than merely formal or iconographic, the reference to the Crucifixion is also experiential. Kreuzweg stages a theatrical rite of passage, a liminal scenography that strips viewing subjects walking through the passageway of their identities and everyday concepts of time and place, after which they are born again, reemerging into a world of a higher order juxtaposing terminality with resurrection.

Kreuzweg is the current culmination of the redemptive theological thread that runs through Schneider’s oeuvre. It is the explicit conclusion of many earlier works. One example of which is CUBE (2005-07). Schneider’s CUBE is a gigantic cubic outdoor structure covered in black cloth, seemingly replicating Islam’s holy edifice of the Kaaba. Formally, a flattened cube results in a cross. In this sense, Kreuzweg is the spatialization of CUBE after it was flattened. The geometrical link between the two works enables Schneider to incorporate CUBE’s scenario of circumambulating a black void into the immersive walked-through black void of Kreuzweg.

In 2008 CUBE became END: a sixty-meter-long dark passageway which Schneider constructed outside Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach. To enter the dark passageway, the viewer had to climb a small ladder and pass through a black square opening. At the end of the passageway, along which one’s own orientation and bodily integrity were being shaken, was a shaft leading the viewer to an underground dark space. The sole way out of the dark underground space was an elevator which carried the viewer to the museum’s illuminated collection galleries on the second floor, as if launching him or her from the domain of black death into the white territory of life after death.

Schneider’s interest in the hereafter can also be traced in his Cryo-Tank Phoenix (2006). A sealed cylindrical tank made of electro-polished stainless steel Cryo-Tank Phoenix was first presented on 02.11.06–the Christian Day of the Dead–at St Peter’s Church, Cologne. Its initial religious backdrop established a fundamental connection between the cryonic vision of preserving dead bodies in low temperature until wishful revivification, the story of Christ’s resurrection, and the anticipated event of his Second Coming. It marked the appearance of Cryo-Tank Phoenix in affinity to the apocalyptic-eschatological circumstances of the hereafter, turning every site in which it emerges into an intermediary zone situated between life and death, between this world and the world to come.

An excerpt from “Gregor Schneider and the Architecture of the Afterlife,” a text by Ory Dessau
More info: http://concentrico.es/en/kreuzweg/

With special thanks to Reinhard Maiworm

Time Present, Photography from the Deutsche Bank Collection, PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, Germany

10.06.2020 - 08.02.2021

Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, NS-Dokumentationszentrum, München, Germany, Curator: Nicolaus Schafhausen (Cat)

28.11.2019 - 18.10.2020