Sleep of Ulro → Art Installation, Liverpool,UK

IF [untitled] architects collaborated with Artist Goshka Macuga to realize a commission in the afoundation gallery in Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennale 2006. Macuga’s all encompassing environment installation is taking inspiration from the set designs from the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, directed in 1919 by Robert Wiene. The ambitious installation utilises the dynamic architecture of the Furnace in order to create elevated walkways, a complex of corridors filled with display cabinets, rotating platforms, hidden rooms and anti-chambers, all of which combine to an abstracted and distorted landscape. Within this complex and intriguing structure a series of theatrical tableaux, performances and exhibitions of artworks, objects and curiosities unfold. The Audience is invited to navigate on, in and around the installation and are given the option to take a guided tour through different journeys, imparting fragments of narrative, based on the immediate environment and the objects displayed within. Macuga’s practice explores the boundaries that define exhibition structures and seeks to put the categories of curator and gallery into a new relationship with each other by hosting the work of other artists within her own immersive environments. Her installations and displays question authorship and hierarchies of value inherent within “High Art”. Artworks are often displayed alongside artifacts, souvenirs, mementos and scrap that she collects, finds, borrows and purchases.