In her exhibition Placeholder at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Sara Wu places the audience in an unusual spatial situation: an elongated construction blocks the wandering gaze, a contemplative lingering seems impossible. Blank spaces in the walls emphasize the architectural construction and its placement in the space, interrupted by sculptural elements that appear like the memory of a use or activity and yet seem alien in their location.
Embedded in the corridor, a landscape of “systems” opens up. This is what the artist calls the collection of modified objects. Objects of everyday consumption in unusual proportions transform conventional notions of their functionality into the absurd and merge with the model-like architecture to create surreal collages. The result is a landscape of things that have been stripped of their function and reorganized and transformed according to purely aesthetic categories.
The nested space, the unusual proportions and superimpositions of the objects break with everyday patterns of perception. Although fully anchored in the realm of Euclidean space and physically tangible, Sara Wu’s spatial construction gives the impression of a digital architectural sketch or a virtual rendering. As with glitches (digital image flaws) the boundaries between real space and its representation become blurred.
Sara Wu often observes and collects spaces through photography and thus conducts exercises in which she allows the sense of sight to guide other senses, making it possible to experience the living world, which has been compressed into surfaces, in a new way. By encountering and transforming images, installations and found objects in different spaces, her work explores how matter reveals and conceals information in different spatio-temporal narratives, and what collective social phenomena are evoked by objects and their constellation.
The spatial experience in the exhibition is particularly irritating because the incorporated elements and modules are borrowed from a modern ideology of interiors that developed in the early 20th century and is characterized by a fundamental re-evaluation of the private and public spheres. The furnishings of individual rooms are determined by the new social tasks. The metamorphosis of the kitchen as a new workplace is particularly striking. In 1926, the Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the “Frankfurt Kitchen” – the archetype of the modern fitted kitchen. As a new built-in model, the kitchen was designed to be as practical as an industrial workplace. What was initially seen as a design measure to increase productivity and shorten the work processes of the “modern housewife” led to a mechanization of living conditions in the following decades and cemented the role of women as unpaid workers, who were now even more relegated to the kitchen floor plan.
In Sara Wu’s exhibition, the fusion of architectural passages or so-called non-places with elements of highly functional spaces leads to a surreal state of limbo between privacy and publicity. A phenomenon that is increasingly determining everyday life, especially due to the growing importance of social media. The artist exposes physical space as merely one of many forms of perception and transforms it in such a way that a multitude of perspectives and patterns of action flow into one another.
With Placeholder, Wu creates a walk-in, physical reflection on the relationships between architecture, function and perception. The exhibition invites the public to actively engage with space, movement and social structures.
