Wide Cube

Berlin-based artist Bettina Khano (*1972) in her work deals with the relationship between space and body. She examines this topic employing the wide range of video, installations and photographic works. The defining characteristic of her more recent installations is the use of artificial fog. She thus creates by the simplest means locations that give a novel dimension to the experience of space and body.
In this vein, Khano at the Art Forum Berlin 2003 exhibited a glass cube filled with artificial fog, intended as a counterbalance to the visual overload of the fair halls full of works of art. Inside the cube the worlds of images disappeared and the visitor could rely only on his own "body thinking".
Derived from this experience, the concept of using artificial fog in a truly existing room emerged. The gallery's "white cube" further gave support to this idea, as even in normal circumstances its surfaces seem to merge into each other because of its white floor and the extremely powerful lighting. Once filled with artificial fog, the gallery turns into a space laboratory itself and becomes part of the installation, as the latter cannot exist without the former and vice versa. The at first only white room mutates into a wide room, and its borders are no longer optically visible but can only be felt, despite the visitor not being in the dark. Even the visitor who is familiar with the room's dimensions from an earlier visit to the gallery or by having guessed them from outside is unable to judge whether the room's walls are very close or infinitely distant. By diving into the fog the visitor becomes the acting subject in search of his own position.
Two series of photos in the next-door office complement the fog installation in the gallery's main room. Their horizon subjects examine the relationship between distance and proximity or between the concrete and the abstract in its visual dimension and illustrate the vast framework the artist sets for this topic.

Ulrich Müller