Implosion

Bettina Khano's latest work, entitled Implosion, is situated in the garden pavilion of Schloss Molsberg used by the Emmanuel Walderdorff gallery.
Using an historical garden pavilion as the point of departure to present art, is no simple undertaking. At such a location, romantic concepts only too swiftly attempt to force themselves into the production and the reception of art: categories such as "nature", "the truth" or "the self purified by nature" threaten to impose themselves onto the artist and the spectator without any reservation.
Bettina Khano's work takes on this difficulty and confronts those aura-like concepts using a similar form of aura-creation. She deals with the veiling of these intuitively equivocated concepts with - truly - nebulous tactics of veiling. Thereby the location that normally opens up the view onto the idyllic surroundings becomes the location of the loss of view. This room filled with clouds of fog no longer offers any view and the spectator, robbed of his ability to visualise that instils security, is thrown back into relying primarily on haptic experience. And as one's own reflection appears from the fog and gradually starts rotating, a strange game takes off, in which Bettina Khano obscures the borders of the secure entities of one's own body and those of the room. This game at times appears to evolve such as to give rise no longer to a sentiment of strangeness but to that of feeling sinister. What remains is no longer a self-reflective, self-complacent civilian of the 21st century, full of thirst of knowledge, but his unsettled fragments in a state of self- and space conception.

Marc Glöde

Irritierende Installation: "Implosion" (Irritating installation: "Implosion", article by Nicola van Bebber, published in the Nassauische Neue Presse 12.03.2003)

The journalist Nicola van Bebber describes her associations when viewing Bettina Khano's installation "Implosion" in the garden pavilion of Schloss Molsberg as an experience that is "a roll-call to the senses". On entering the tiny octangular pavilion the visitor is engulfed in fog and can decipher the two mirrors that form a cross in the middle of the room but as a "sharp-edged something", she writes in her article. Once facing it directly, having stepped carefully forwards so as not to cut himself, the spectator discovers his own reflection, she adds. The artist's concern are new forms, the dissolution of body borders and of the room. "It is a sudden 'turning oneself inside out'. It's as if you implode within yourself," Bettina Khano is cited as giving her interpretation of the work of art. "People are lifted out of the normal system - almost similar to being on a roller coaster. Just that one feels as light as cotton candy..."