This video provides you with a walkthrough of Mandla Reuter’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland. It’s the first solo exhibition of the German artist in Switzerland. Mandla Reuter confronts the visitor with an exhibition that features sculptures, objects, photographies and film, and is separated into a sequence of rooms with distinct characters. Mandla Reuter was born 1976 in Nqutu, South Africa. The artist lives and works in Basel (Switzerland) and Berlin (Germany).
Mandla Reuter at Kunsthalle Basel. Opening reception, January 17, 2013.
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Excerpt from the press release:
In his enigmatic works and architectonic installations, Reuter often explores the function of rooms, which he subtly or remarkably transforms and restructures, and whose utility and perimeters are consequently altered. As such, the artist makes explicit the visual, physical, and psychological potential in controlling a space. To that end, Reuter might block doors or impede staircases and entire galleries and museum spaces in order to grant them an intimacy””alternately aggressive and pathos-laden””otherwise missing, turning them into private rooms in the process.
In this manner he sensitizes the visitor towards the public, sometimes sterile institutional space and highlights the architectural as well as the aesthetic and social conditions for the production of art. Confronted with Reuter’s alterations, the spectator is forced to find new ways through the exhibition space and experience its galleries in altogether different ways. Through simple, exacting gestures, the artist renders visible the power dynamics that shape each architectural environment, and points out the structures (institutional, personal) that form and inform our ever-artificial surroundings.