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Franz Ehmann has pursued his interest in installation and in the grand themes of life and death in the Blue Room of Humanity, his latest exhibition which turned one large room of the Institute of Modern Art into a metaphorical 'blue grotto'. Using a rich blue pigment Ehmann inscribed the floor with words and numbers orchestrated in careful calculations to form a notation of significant historical injustices, a catalogue of violence, atrocities, and memories lost. The text primarily drew connections to specific moments in the histories of Austria and Australia as part of Ehmann's constant defining of his role as an other, or 'foreigner', in Australia. The text relates, in part also, to the dispossession of the Aboriginal people, and could be read on one level as a call for reconciliation.
The Blue Room might be seen as exposing the evidence of our combined, mass sweeping of cultural, social and political history under the metaphorical 'carpet'. Situated as though floating on the text is a pile of blue pigment, juxtaposed in similar size and shape with a pile of small, plastic blue toy soldiers - guns and bayonets at the ready - along with some pieces of intertwined wax. Wax often features in Ehmann's installations and he has referred to its loose translation from the German wachs, as growth. The Beuysian quality of its inclusion is not lost, while the blue offers the work a melancholy, nostalgic quality which avoids sentimentality and cliché.
The text, written in several languages, but primarily German, along with the numbers, can never be seen as a whole, limited as the viewer is to a vertical relationship with the work. Ironically the viewing