Between ‘here’ and ‘there’, there’s a whole lot of in-between. And German punk minimalism supremo Isa Genzken’s installation at Hauser & Wirth revels in those transition spaces and moments.
The central space is filled with rows of aeroplane seats and windows. The window shutters are half open or fully closed; they look like pairs of eyes, asleep or drunken or confused or wide awake.
Architectural models in the next space show designs for windows and doors to nowhere – pointless additions to buildings which create only middle places, not starting points or destinations. A concrete sculpture near the entrance manages to be both open and closed-off at the same time.
There’s a lot of waffle in art about ‘liminality’, but this isn’t about in-between-ness, it’s the creation of it. That’s different, and it’s a lot more interesting. All of this feels like a plea for nuance, for a bit of grey in a black-and-white world. Genzken creates in-between spaces, nowheres, places where you don’t have to be one thing or another, where life doesn’t have to be set in stone. It’s a bit of conceptual sanity in a world where that’s totally lacking.
