Opening: Friday, 13 May 2022, 19 hrs

Exhibition: 14 May - 19 June 2022

Artist Talk: Sunday, 29. May 2022, 14:00 hrs

Anne Prenzler and Rainer Hofmann in conversation with Andrea Božić and Julia Willms at KUBUS (Free admission, in English)

After the end of the KunstFestSpiele 2022, The Cube will be presented at KUBUS until 19 June. The installation can also be experiences as part of the Night of the Museums on the 18 of June.

The Cube is an audio-visual installation, an immersive environment for a white cube space where the entire room is part of the work. The installation re-organizes the apparatus of the white cube by overlapping the architectural space with images of the forces of nature at work. For the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, The Cube has found a perfect host at the municipal gallery Kubus, seamlessly fusing with it.

The Cube fills a wall with a video projection of the gallery space itself, extending and doubling the white cube space through central-perspective projection. A series of very slow cross-fades overlaps spectacular weather conditions, dramatic natural landscapes and animals into this extended space. The relative scales of a mountain landscape or a snail are modified to fit into the same white cube, making everything either too big or too small relative to the eponymous cube or the viewers: The mountain appears in miniature but the snail is a giant both in relation to the room and the spectator. The extended white cube does not remain unchanged by the forces and animals it contains, but the walls also break open so the visitor finds themselves at the top of a mountain or in an aquarium. The installation brings images into this white cube that problematize human relationship with and interventions into nonhuman systems. Alpine pastures and rocky mountain ranges which look like ‘wild’ nature but are in fact landscapes co-created artificially through cultivation’ and heavily exploited for skiing and other nature sports and tourism.

The installation overlaps a cinematic procedure with the architecture, intensifying the presence of the resulting imaginal space. The very slow cross-fades invite the viewer into deeply immersive states while underlining the actual room. One’s gaze shifts between these two poles, internalizing the environment: One is both here and elsewhere. The Cube is a moving sculpture, a choreography of gaze, a performance of space.

The Cube is based on analogic dream logic: By weaving the organic, architectural and digital spaces, both the continuity of materialities as well as the logic of space constantly shift, placing the viewer into a perspective which is always multiple, allowing for the experience of multiplicity, and to occupy several spacetimes at the same time.

"Something that opens up a new way of thinking or offers a new kind of experience is political. We need new ways of telling stories because the old ways are so contaminated by habits of thinking and being that have got us into the situation we are in now, which is not a good one. Coming from somewhere that is in between and doesn’t quite fit with existing modes of categorisation is as good a starting point as any for trying to think and do things differently. The Cube affords beholders a wonderfully gentle, but deeply affecting way of doing precisely this." Ramsay Burt