Andrea Iten - Somnia, Installation, Kunsthaus Glarus 7.7 – 1.9.2002


"When the Glarner artist Andrea Iten (born in 1959, living in Basel) makes pictures drift past us on video from travels faraway continents, she does this not for the sake of the exoticism of these places, but rather to use the distance achieved to risk a fresh look at our own environment. In her newest work "Somnia", a multi-part video and spatian installation daringly connecting video art and theater, Andrea Iten will send visitors on a journey to their inner self: to the terra incognita of sleep. The installation, which opens itself to the public as a spatial triptych, can also be circumambulated and used. Important elements of Andrea Iten's previous work - the precise use of text, playing with the level of images and sound, the choice of spectaculary unspectacular images - become denser in "Somnia" and undergo an important extension: The poverfully spatial production enables the observer not only to view the images from everyday life and from the sleep laboratory from the outside, but also to internalize them in the "quiet room" (through a subtle interactive sound installation). "Somnia takes note of the work of the imaginary. By continuously walking along, changing, and renegotiation the borders between the internal and the external, day and night, souond and silence, composition and association, a new discourse arises against the coma of images; a discourse under the protection of which sleep maintains its mystery. Even the metaphor, which crosses borders in the same way as the threshold it occupies, refuses the obsession with clarity: Somnia, meaning sleep - but also: dream, delusion, sleep of death," writes the dramaturge Regine Halter, who has followed the development of the project from its inception."

Nadia Schneider, Curator Kunsthaus Glarus, press release

< back