Protection Room is an exhibition wherein five artists will inhabit « Rosa Brux », which originally functioned as a flat. Protection Room explores nuances of transparency and opacity and the thin line between the private and the public – questioning if this line still exists. During a week five artists respond to different aspects and tactics of ‘hiding’ and ‘covering over’ (« protection ») – making reference to hyper-visible control of public spaces and the relationship between body and architecture. Protection Room asks how to claim our « right to opacity » (Edouard Glissant) and in what way opacity can function as protection in a world of super-exposure. It detects the obscureness and confinement of transparency and will function as an opaque view on the subject matter that can be linked to the public-space, private-self and over-exposed world. Structures and metal barriers function to direct the flow of people. At the same time these structures impact our private body in ways that are involuntary and with an unclear purpose. Todays ‘public space’ is democratized, we accept and submit permission for use of our private-selves without a second thought. One can question if movement between a ‘public’ and a ‘public’ is all that is left and how the feeling of security can be guarded, without giving in to systems of hyper-control.
During a week Protection Room offers space for subtle touching points between the working process of the artists – intertwining proximity and distance.