Outside Emanuel Rossetti’s “Delay Dust” one might miss a text Georgia Sagri has inserted inside a small frame outside the main entrance of the Kunsthalle Bern. It addresses allusively the unreachable horizon of contemporary ethics: the pain of interaction, the vanity of art and the violence of contemporary conflict.Entering the first room, one arrives at the heart of a proposal that designates the exhibition as a kind of stage: a red-saturated environment accompanied by a loud synthetic drone sound coming out of a hanging speaker. The other rooms consist mainly of alternative displays of these basic elements. The red carpet covers them totally, partially or not at all. In one entirely red room, the floor has been slightly elevated. Alarm bells displayed on the floor ring, confusing the contingency of the event with the necessity they come to perform. One could map the exhibition in terms of the level of immersion a room offers, from the inside’s inside to the outside of the inside. When leaving the red rooms, one doesn’t know anymore if one has exited the performative space and now entered a kind of backstage.
The summoned sensations in their elementary quality exceed interiority, provoke materiality and offer a possible conceptualization in relation to their interface. Here, the pre-critical environmental or perceptive level, the critical aspect of contextual installation, and whatever comes now or after, all superimpose indifferently. The only representational artifact of the exhibition, a small paper printout of a 3-D digital donut Rossetti has used as signature in previous years, confirms it: the historical time of institutionalization no longer opposes a conception of time wherein once happening equals forever.
