October 12, 2013 - January 26, 2014
Sabine Hornig
Sensory Spaces
Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam
Sensory Spaces is a series of commissioned solo projects presented in the Willem van der Vorm Gallery, located in the freely accessible exhibition space in the museum’s entrance hall. Artists are invited to respond to the architectural qualities of the space, emphasizing notions of transformation and surprise.
Sabine Hornig (Germany, lives in Berlin) is known for making photographs, sculptures and installations that distort or intensify our experience of space and time. At first glance, her work can appear deceptively simple, but with a longer look, it becomes evident that it is testing the viewer’s perception.
This gallery-sized installation, specially produced for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, is no exception. The work consists of an open wooden structure with transparent printed fabric stretched over it on the inside. Handmade architectural elements, including a window sill, table platform and a swinging wall, have been placed on either side of the construction.
Visitors can walk around the structure or enter it through an opening. Inside, they see that the space is not closed but transparent. The printed fabric is so sheer that the existing gallery space appears to have been overlaid with a fictive second space. This second space seems to stand at the crossroads between reality and fiction.
With works like ‘Twins’ and the installation for Sensory Spaces, Hornig makes the viewer think in an almost philosophical way about the experience of space and the passage of time. Her complex, hallucinatory installations string together different moments, locations and perspectives. Though Hornig’s work can regularly be seen in international solo and group exhibitions, this is the first time it has been shown in the Netherlands. In addition, this is the first installation she has created that consists largely of wall scale photographs printed on transparent fabric. These are good reasons to pose a few questions to the artist.
Each year three artists will be invited to develop site-specific work for the new series ‘Sensory Spaces’ in the Willem van der Vorm Gallery. The selected artists have never or rarely shown their work in the Netherlands and each artist has their own work method, use of materials and vision