Protection Room

Protection Room is an exhibition in which five artists take over and live at “Rosa Brux,” which originally was an apartment. Protection Room explores nuances of transparency and opacity, and the thin line between the private and the public – questioning whether this line still exists. For a week the five artists will respond to different aspects and tactics of “hiding” and “covering over” (“protection”) – referencing the highly visible surveillance of public spaces and the relationship between the body and architecture. Protection Room asks how we can claim our “right to opacity” (Edouard Glissant) and in what way opacity can function as protection in a world of extreme exposure. It detects the obscurity and confinement of transparency and will function as an opaque view on subject matter that can be linked to the public space, private self, and the overexposed world. Structures and metal barriers serve 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. Today’s “public space” is democratized; we accept and sign off on the use of our private selves without a second thought. One wonders whether movement between one “public” and another is all that is left and how the feeling of security can be safeguarded, without giving in to systems of extreme surveillance.

For a week Protection Room will offer a space for subtle points of contact between the artists’ individual working processes – thus scrambling notions of proximity and distance.