Visitors Guide, installation - 540 x 250 x 120 cm, 2016.
Drawings on paper mounted on wood, wooden bases, framed drawings on paper, vinyl lettering, video in a flat screen, neon lights
VISITORS GUIDE, 2016
This installation brings together three recent works, about the instructions peculiar to specific spaces.
These spaces can be seen as ‘heterotopias’, a term used by Michel Foucault in order to describe spaces which have more layers of meanings and relationships with other spaces than immediately visible with the eye.
‘Enter’ (book and video, 2015) consists of a list of verbs as the summary of all actions I encountered while entering the prison as a teacher, once a week, three years in a row.
‘What is your next project’ (series of drawings on paper, 2016) started with a large collection of hand-outs of exhibitions I visited last year. These drawings are built with different parameters about the common performance, behaviour and interaction of the visitor.
In ‘Medium happiness’ (drawings on wood, 2016) the symbolic language of Japanese fortune telling meets the unambiguous signs I derived from observations in the public space in Tokyo.
The structure of these three spaces is being questionned in a play with the functionality of information by articulating irrelevant subjects. ‘Visitors Guide’, a terminology from tourism, can be split in ‘visiting’ and ‘guiding’ in order to reflect on the active or passive position of the viewer. By using different aesthetics referring to the guiding of a view, the display of the window functions additionally as an information screen on the current exhibition inside that space.
Lore Smolders
