Hello Darkness. Surfing on glam-trash quotations, Olaf Breuning's new installation for the SI toys with ideas of artifice and luxury and contrasts these to the supposed sublime found in books and in art. The materiality and availability of such luxury items is what interests Breuning.
Hello Darkness
Following the path of an ax-wielding sex doll, the
viewer crawls through a destroyed library and patches of smoke, is
hypnotized by a light tunnel and sounds of a crackling fire, and enters
a new world, out of the realm of knowledge and abstract ideas. Surfing
on glam-trash quotations, Olaf Breuning's new installation for the SI
toys with ideas of artifice and luxury and contrasts these to the
supposed sublime found in books and in art. The materiality and
availability of such luxury items is what interests Breuning. "I
deliberately keep very close to media sources," says Breuning, "I'm
tempted to cut the concept of reality out of my vocabulary". Ordered off
the internet, the "Real Doll" represents the ultimate in a artifice, but
taken into a context of an art installation Breuning exposes not only
the artificiality of the Real Doll, but also dispels our trust in the
supposed reality of our art world. His unsettling intersection of
internet-sexuality and the aggression against the foundations of the
historical world, beckons the viewer in, to mingle in Breuning's world
devoid of the distinction between reality and non-reality.
The opening reception is Tuesday May 28, from 6 to 8 at the SI.
Image: Olaf Breuning, Breuning Sybille
Swiss Institute
495 Broadway
New York