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Exhibition text Alex Thake
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Center for Contemporary Art Karlsruhe
Alex Thake
Opening 07.07.2023
The door is always open
08.07.-06.08.2023
Thake’s installation at Center for Contemporary Arts Karlsruhe is redolent of huit clos, a closed door dividing two rooms. Unsure which room is hell, the anxious tenants act according to their hopes, wedded to the desperate uncertainty that the side they inhabit is the right one. Punctuated by the sound of falling rain and passing trains, the view supposes a two-direction movement. The ascension from the unknown towards unsettlement and the inverse descension moving down and back towards the light. The closed door is the only source of illumination which draws everything else in its shadow. Akin to the state of social anesthesia which erases the distinction between the houses of discipline and public design by incorporating the same tactics of behavioral persuasion, the difficulty would be to show the porosity of institutions. To reveal them as populated by objects which embody a paranoid obsession with safety as another tool of behavioral suggestion meant to be carried out with a joyful countenance. So how do we recognise our complicity, when recognition means desperation, pain and an inconsolable withdrawal so excruciating that we prefer to sleep? The trains are passing, the drops dripping, and still we sit in our rooms, expecting something to happen, waiting for someone to open the door.
Text: AT & SL
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