In the exhibition ‘The New Man, The Announcer, The Constructor. El Lissitzky: Self-Portrait as the Kestner Gesellschaft’, the association traced its origins and avant-garde mission.
The show presented works by El Lissitzky, who was intensely occupied with developing a language and aesthetics for a new society and whose legendary first solo exhibition was staged here in 1923, alongside important contemporaries, and pieces by present-day artists.
For our exhibition architecture, we started by identifying the characteristics and potential of each space and combining these into a spatial continuum that would permit the works to optimally unfold while revealing the “relationships” and associative connections between them, beyond any barriers between the different spaces and levels.
Using basic geometries to zone and establish relationships between the spaces, we transformed the building into a three-dimensional field of experimentation. Some of these spaces were rendered infinite by painting them black – El Lissitzky’s ‘space-consuming colour’ – or lining them with mirrors.
Recalling choreographic markings on the dancefloor, we inscribed imaginary, spatially intertwining trajectories which became the setting for the exhibits, installations, the exhibition infrastructure (‘Proun triangle’, vitrines, monitors, etc.) and the visitors, who, treated as equals, became open to enigmatic perspectives. This environment became our setting for the Proun Room, a reconstruction of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (1965), a solitary volume in the exhibition fabric that formed a nucleus for the ideas around it and transformed its surroundings into the background to the actual scenario.
Through 3D-modelling we developed the existing spaces with all their idiosyncrasies and the positioned exhibits into a spatial sequence, establishing fields of reference between the different levels, simulating new ways of looking that encouraged visitors to shift between past, present and future.
A QR code enabled these visitors to virtually read the structure of this experimental space – superimposed upon the real space – on their smartphone.