illuminated hideout 4.0
the quarantine
installation / 2009
with Anders Grønlien
The gallery is a small old shop taking place in a street where the road is utmost the pavement and hide the space a bit. In the windowframe of the gallery, two gloves, the hands of an imaginary monster, are exhibited. In the darkness of the gallery space, a pile of cardboard boxes, made according to the irregular dimensions of the exhibition space, proportionally diminish. The boxes are set in front of the backwall, which has been built to seamlessly close access to the back room where the gallery´s facilities (office, toilets, storage) are located.
From behind the wall blocking off the gallery facilities the audience can hear a sound clip of rustling creatures grunting and struggling to escape the confinement of the isolated back rooms. The audio clip is a collage made from sound recordings of the gallerists in the exhibition space, directed by the artists.
From the inside of one half-opened box smoke is venting as well as projecting a ray of strong light, which lights up a photograph. This photo has been taken in the confined space behind the boxes and makes use of the galerists dressed with the silicon gloves previously seen by the spectator. These prosthetics have been made by the artists under supervision of Brian Wade, special effects make-up artist and sculptor for the cinema (The Thing, The Blob, StarTrek, Gremlins, ...). They have been made from the mold of one of the galerist’s hands, which constitute the inside print.
Opaque paper, smoke, lighting, cartboard boxes,
silicon prothesis, sound, c-print
ETC gallery - Global Locals, NTK Gallery
Prague, Czech Republic
Click here to see a video report about this exhibition made by Artycok TV.
Presentation by Markéta Vinglerová, curator
illuminated hideout 4.0 - the quarantine
April – May 2009
Michael Gimenez and Anders Grønlien have been working together for several years. Their last three exhibitions (AVU, Meet Factory and Entrance Gallery) are interrelated, and the installation in etc. gallery on from them.
It concerns a frame project in which the authors place gallery spaces as well as their curators in the role of media. They treat space as a characteristic material, transform it and create installations evokan atmosphere of déjà vu. The visitor has experienced something similar before – not the actual installations, though they give us a sensation we felt before when drawn into an intensive visual perception, so easily accessible through the genre of film. It is a mix of reality and fiction searching the boundaries of a work of art, or experiencing zero gravity while floating through space (AVU installation 2008). The motives of individual semantic elements are close to the essential moments and icons of cult sci-fi films (Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey). The subtleness of the artistic work is propped up by its formal perfection.
In the case of the Illuminated Hideout 4.0 - the Quarantine project in etc. gallery, the authors consulted with Brian Wade, the famous special make-upartist, coincidentally living in Prague. The result is a horror photograph of an alien (a derivate of the gallery curators) has seized the etc. gallery. Other elements of the installation semantically refer to the American film noir Kiss me deadly (1955). Authors chose the irregular shape of the exhibition space itself as a module for their installations, which they multiply in the form of proportionally diminish boxes, one of which is specifically related to the moment of all-absorbing light. A mystic atmosphere on the verge of real and film scenography: the gallery is transformed into a mise-en-scène.
