Cella, Complesso monumentale, Rome, 2009
“Heliacal said of the rising of a star when it first emerges from the sun’s rays and becomes visible before sunrise, or of its setting when it is last visible after sunset before being lost in the sun’s rays…”
These words appeared around an image of Korey Wise, a misfortunate New York City ghetto kid in Margret Wibmer’s 1990 work Double fear. Wibmer transferred a newspaper image of the wrongfully convicted Central Park Jogger rapist during interrogation onto a dark stretched rubber, surrounded by a gilded frame. The installation The waiting room as part of the exhibition Cella presents an ambiguous experience, a conundrum of time and reckoning. These walls report centuries of lifetimes bracing against them; clawing, banging to mentally break down while being absorbed into a progressively abstract state of being.
The sound creates a push-pull of inviting and haunting, visiting and being visited, compelling while rejecting. The surging and receding noise metaphorically presents a moral dilemma of cause and consequence, as it treats the ‘perpetrator’ both as an accomplice and an alien. In given time the walls of the chamber are swept up into a particle storm of oblivion.
Buried in the eddies are relics of the world; a church bell, the echo of gods voice floating past in dizzy irony, a clockwork measuring sacrifice vs. salvation. A shelter with no exit now reverberates with quandary, doubt, and a cataclysm of deliverance.
Suzanne Morianz
Warteraum, 2009. Interactive sound installation for prison cell. Sound, chair. Tracking and sound composition in collaboration with: Byungjun Kwon
Part of the exhibition and research project ‘Cella’ at Complesso Monumentale di San Michele a Ripa, Rome. Curated by Christoph Bertsch and Silvia Höller.
With works by Pipilotte Rist, Matthew Barney, Jannis Kounellis, Greogor Schneider, Tania Bruguera, Eva Schlegl, Lois Weinberger, Giuseppe Penone, Fatima Bornemissza, Thomas Feuerstein and other artists.