A great big pair of boobs. That’s the first thing you see – two huge, blazing neon outlines of tits, mounted on the wall. Except, maybe they’re not tits at all, just U-shaped, pinky-white curves with red circles within – merely abstract lines. So if you see them as breasts, well, that’s entirely your projection, you sex-obsessed pervert.
This question – how we identify and recognise aspects of the human body – is the central theme of Das Institut, the collaborative moniker of German artists Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder. Or rather, it’s pretty much their only theme. Not that there aren’t some intriguing, rather mad works on display. Particularly good is a slideshow of images depicting the artists dressed up in strange, diaphanous clothes and with sections of their bodies painted the same black as the background, which creates the effect of freakishly altering their profiles. The idea is to present the human form as something malleable, indefinable, even magical.
Mostly, though, these concepts are emphasised too forcefully. Many pieces initially seem abstract: huge sheets of paper featuring melting, marbled colours; gloopy, shimmering stained-glass designs; or tiny, petroglyph-like slide projections. But if you look closely you start to see human forms – facial features among the swirling patterns, or diagrammatic shapes that resolve into little figures. Not that you ever have to look particularly closely, however, because Das Institut have made the figurative elements pretty obvious, even with the most psychedelic designs. It’s a problem that’s particularly acute in the central installation, where, amid thrumming music and shifting spotlights, patterned hangings throw creepy, insect-like shadows. It’s passably entertaining, like a trippily updated Victorian son-et-lumière show; but that’s the thing: everything is shown to you. Everything, you feel, is explicitly revealed, so that there’s no room for your own imagination and no sense of mystery.