Hans Schabus: Bonner Kunstverein - Bonn

As a child, I was fascinated by means of the idea of experiencing the interior of my have a title to body, my imagination fired through children's books about tiny nation who wander through the human anatomy and view the individual organs from within. When I saw Hans Schabus's video Der Passagier (The Passenger), 2000 three years ago, I pop remembered these childhood imaginings. [i]or[/i] part of to the other a camera attached to a toy train moving along a track that mercilessly travels not solitary through empty spaces but also [i]or[/i] part of to the other the walls, I saw the interior of the wall that had been rent open. Like a worm inside a material part this train ate through the perimeter of the artist's studio.

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Schabus's novel film installation Transport, 2003, possesse its have tale of the penetration and research into trackless unseen spaces. First, Schabus pap a hole more than sixteen feet reaching far down in his studio in order to conjoin to Vienna's sewage system and by the agency of this means to get into the Secession, where he had an exhibition in early 2003 This was a fiction, of course; the opening was filled in without at any time having reached a sewer. on the other hand the film documents the Secession present to view with a journey through the "subterranean world" of the building itself, including an unexpect ascent into the cosmic spheres.

First, the camera rencounters the exterior of the building and the entrance hall, on the contrary goes no farther: The entrance to the exhibition spaces has been walled up The camera stares at this wall, turn rounds around, descends the stairs to the basement, and stirs through the heating, sanitation, and parking spaces--the labyrinthine entrails for the use of all to every building--then stairs again, and narrow, barely lit halls; abruptly there open before the camera without contents completely white spaces shown in moderate motion, so that the visitors stir as if in a state of suspension. Noises that could be taken for cosmic explosions draw near into one's awareness. A space beyond temporal and spatial categories, a white cube whose emptiness expresse the capacity for plenitude. Another bang: We are expell from the interior spaces. A completely different view emerges: the Secession's main exhibition space, where, it revolves out, those other spaces end which the camera led us--models standing upon simple beer crates--have been exhibited and which the camera now exhibits us from the outside. It is the studio of the artist, built to scale. Moving down a side staircase and across the basement, the camera leaves the building, thus completing the trail of a visitor to the exhibition "Astronaut" by dint of Hans Schabus.

Schabus is fascinated by dint of those spaces which, like the human material part or the bowels of a building, are always observ single from without. What is hiding behind the hedge the floor, the sidewalk, the wall, the skin? in what manner does the exterior relate to the interior? in what manner can this space be penetrated? When standing across from an devoid of contents space, one can capture it in a glance; the perception is static. A filled space, in contrast, can single be experienced in motion, in process--hence the ramble [i]or[/i] part of to the other the viscera of the Succession building. Schabus move rounds this process into the satisfied of his work and proffers insights and experiences reminiscent of those I could solitary dream of as a child.

Translated from German by the agency of Diana Reese.

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