Through the Looking Glass

What does the hole that Alice follows the White Rabbit into look like? For the Berlin-based artist collective FORT (Jenny Kropp and Alberta Niemann), the answer is clear: it looks just like any other rabbit hole, otherwise Lewis Carroll’s crazed tale simply wouldn’t work: without the familiar, there can be no disconcertment. As a statement by the group explains: ‘a story that tries to recount a smooth transition into dreamlike worlds needs not only an unsettling lure, but also a portal that appears credible in its worldly disguise.’ Staging fantastic, slightly bizarre and unsettling parallel worlds that are entered via a seemingly harmless portal is one of FORT’s core concerns.

The group’s beginnings date back to 2006 when Kropp and Niemann (together with co-founder Anna Jandt, who left the group after FORT’s solo show at Kunsthaus Dresden in 2013) created and ran a fictitious hotel in a disused customs building dating from the 1960s on Bremen’s docks for three days (Hotel, 2006). The model for the project was Arthur Hailey’s 1965 bestseller Hotel, which describes the efFORTs by the management of a struggling hotel in New Orleans to defend it against a hostile takeover by a large hotel chain and get it back on its feet. What people usually expect from a hotel in terms of architecture and service was used by the artists as a grid on which to hang all manner of spatial and performative peculiarities: guests checking in, for example, were asked not for their credit card number, but for their shoe size; in one room, there were two of every object, arranged to mirror each other.

Under different conditions, the group’s interest in the hospitality sector continued. In Berlin in 2008 they were invited by curator Susanne Pfeffer to fit out Hotel Marienbad, a former apartment at Kunst-Werke on Auguststrasse. FORT invited artists to stay on one condition: ‘instead of payment, each inhabitant leaves behind an artistic intervention in the space.’ The group installed a secret compartment with a five-tier bunk bed behind a large one-way mirror, which they themselves occasionally lived in for the duration of the project.

This love of disappearing into the walls, of eerie rooms, of objects that take on a weird life of their own and of unexpected situational twists is a thread running through the collective’s work. But they don’t want to let this element of surprise (or eeriness) become a credo: ‘we’re not going to start organizing flash mobs on Alexanderplatz,’ says Kropp. ‘We don’t want to go down in history as an artists group with theatrical leanings. It’s good that our work changes.’1 In this respect, too, last year’s exhibition in Dresden was a challenge: as the group’s first institutional solo show, it forced them to engage with the conditions of an art institution and the associated audience expectations. The Kunsthaus was about to be temporarily closed for renovation, a prospect that cast a shadow over the show. Embracing this they presented the exhibition spaces as a summer resort mothballed for the winter: windows were boarded up and old ceramic tiles were used to create an empty swimming pool that visitors had to pass through to access the other rooms.

Such film-like scenarios are calculated for greatest possible impact. ‘It was about a single moment,’ says Niemann, ‘not about telling a whole story’. Instead of a linear narrative, most FORT works aim for a kind of ‘cinematic experience’. Perhaps this transfer of cinema into art (or rather the kidnapping of cinema from the cinema) is the crucial element here. Set design takes on a life of its own in the guise of an installation. With these atmospheric stagings, FORT aims to investigate the cultural preferences that audiences bring to an art institution. Films, and perhaps to a greater extent television series, play a major role. In these situations, the contest between the ‘immersive’ quality of cinema and the ‘reflexive’ approach of contemporary art appears far from decided. Ultimately, the group’s ‘hotel interventions’ may be not so much about the dichotomy between private and public, nor about the latent eeriness often found in such rooms. It may not even be the hotel as such that interests FORT, rather the various representations of hotels in cinema – from Grand Hotel (1932) to The Shining- (1980) to _The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Perhaps the act of slipping theatrically into a classic service provider role, like that of the hotel manager, is an attempt to escape, by a nimble twist, the service provider role of the artist.

Playing with audience expectations is something that can work anywhere. At the 16th edition of the Liste art fair in Basel in 2011, the group combined installation with a suprising performance. The Eye Balled Walls (2011) consisted of a vitrine resembling a billiard table, a triangle of hand-ground charcoal shaped into eggs, a boiled and peeled chicken’s egg on a kind of Fabergé stand, and five sharpened pool cues leaning against the wall. In addition, a mustard-coloured curtain provided a hiding place where a member of the group concealed themselves for each day of the fair to observe the visitors to the installation. All that could be seen were the tips of a pair of highly polished men’s shoes peeping out from under the curtain. Occasionally these would shift gently. This mixture of play and voyeurism also realized an age-old artist’s dream: to be able to watch the audience’s reaction to your work without having to be present.

The group also combined presence and absence with their sleep performance Low Lid, originally created in 2011 as an application for the prestigious Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Grant (and reprised in January 2012 at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódz´, Poland). Kropp, Jandt and Niemann each took a dose of the sedative Midazolam and presented themselves asleep on the floor. By this action, the artists both submitted to protocol and sidestepped it – a gesture of refusal towards the jury procedure and contrived situations of competition.

Executing a performance exactly as announced is something the group finds dif­ficult, says Kropp, so instead they use a technique of displacement. In 2010, when they were invited to give a performance at Galerie Lena Brüning in Berlin, FORT had a black poster printed with ‘The Golden Rule’ printed on it in white letters and transferred the supposed gallery show out onto the street (The Golden Rule, 2010). This was a deliberate step, as the kind of surprises FORT are aiming for can no longer (or only very rarely) be realized in the white cube. While the audience waited in the empty gallery for the performance to begin, Supertramp’s song School (1974) played on loop for 90 minutes: ‘I can see you in the morning when you go to school / Don’t forget your books, you know you’ve got to learn the golden rule.’ Meanwhile, outside the gallery, on Almstadtstraße, strange things were happening, as well as unremarkable ones: a woman rummaging in her bag, someone making a phone call on the corner of the street, a passer-by carrying a yellow plastic bag bearing a FORT logo, four young men in football shirts jogging along the street. Between 40 and 50 people took part in the performance, coordinated by two unidentified helpers. The three artists also played their part: equipped with a bucket of glue and a ladder, they pasted up their ‘Gold Rule’ posters on a wall on Almstadtstrasse – like a signature needing to be constantly refreshed for the duration of the show.

FORT also take the opposite approach, dragging so much reality into the gallery space that any kind of defamiliarizing artistic gesture becomes obsolete: in 2012, for their Leck exhibition at Galerie Crone in Berlin, they treated the interior of a vacated former Schlecker drug store in Prenzlauer Berg as a found object and turned it into a show. Here, the empty shelves, the interlocked shopping trolleys, and an endlessly rattling cash register created the feel of a haunted house – an abandoned place which felt as if people had only just stopped working in it. The cash register itself still had a length of roll protruding from it, on it the word ‘Powerfail’ was printed five times in a row. FORT had left everything more or less exactly as they found it. There was no need to further dramatize. Viewers would know the story of the bankrupting of the Schlecker empire in 2012, with the loss of around 36,000 jobs, and the ensuing political discussion (the cynical proposal by then labour minister Ursula von der Leyen for retraining the ‘Schlecker women’ or FDP chairman Philipp Rösler’s talk of ‘subsequent usage’). The installation was not as dead at it first appeared. Instead, it was strangely and powerfully eloquent and alive. In a way, this was another work using a large mirror – not to walk through or to hide behind, but to reflect an aspect of social reality that is all too often overlooked or ignored.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell