One on One
In Annika Kahrs’s For Two to Play on One, a pair of young pianists play a classical duet which stops abruptly as the visitor pushes open the baroque wooden doors. The aesthetics of interruption and the space between public and private are played out in one excruciating moment, as the intruder gingerly steps inside, watched closely by the room’s inhabitants. The title looms true. For its recent winter show One on One, The KW Institute in Berlin has built a series of white cubes within the gallery, ranging in size from cupboard-like to cavernous, each dedicated to an artwork intended for one viewer. Attendants are tasked with enforcing the single person rule and guests are handed a black door hanger upon entry to keep the rest of the world out.
Curator Susanne Pfeffer has set up an experiment in institutional intimacy, where each untouched situation acts as a trigger for a series of smaller revelations. While performance art in large museums often leaves the performer adrift in an expanse, defenseless against the crowd, here the works containing performative elements are some of the most impressive, conveying an uneasy sense of vulnerability. Joe Coleman’s A Holy Ghost Compares its Hooves (2012), situated in a tiny room above a rickety staircase, utilises this capacity for shock, featuring a performer in the process of painting a brutal model landscape while a screen shows the raving of fundamentalist Christians condemning the world to hellfire and damnation. In a larger gallery, this kind of spectacle of confrontation can seem forced. In this context, however, it becomes capable of high drama. Perhaps more importantly, the white-walled space outside the rooms becomes a ‘pure’ gallery