Nika Spalinger & Lang/Baumann

Nika Spalinger proposes a huge installation where immense vails – drawn about by electric motors – move about in the exhibition space. A screen half-opens, then closes again, in an ebb and flow movement. A hypnotic motion emerges. The eye rummages beyond the curtains, behind the image. But behind the image there is nothing, desperately nothing, and the image only works through what it avoids, lacks, surreptitiously passes through, and skims…
Set directly on the floor, five impressive modules write a well known word in inflated
letters : SPORT. Two monitors survey the space ; on them we see Lang/Baumann training hard. Each movement sketched out is inexorably slowed down by the way the image is treated. The whole seems to be suspended in an other-worldly void, where the forces of gravity enable any sportsman or -woman to make unheard-of figures and combinations.

Marc-Olivier Wahler translated by Simon Pleasance

Opening February 7 1998
Exhibition from February 8 to April 5 1998