Ringing doors, ecstatic pools, mysterious forests and other portals

Sensual, playful approaches and new perspectives on worlds not perceived in everyday life open up all the works in our exhibition in the park and in the theatre. The forms and aesthetics, on the other hand, are diverse: immersive video and VR installations, colourful paintings, film noir videos, comical sound art objects and interactive sculptures. A journey of discovery for the curious.

Close the door, it's roaring

Erwin Stache

It is the surprising and unexpected that accompanies you at every turn when you enter Erwin Stache's surreal world of sound. His often interactive installations combine sound and music with visual art elements and are usually based on a humorous alienation of everyday circumstances.

There are ‘spaceless’ doors in the landscape that sound when we open them and become paradoxical volume controls for the world of noise that surrounds us. Robot-like machine creatures float on the water, emitting seemingly random sounds by causing metal tubes to submerge and emerge. On the other hand, there seem to be certain ‘agreements’. Do they react to us? In Flüster Laut, megaphones begin a dialogue that somehow leads nowhere. Or is something being kept from us? Who is actually eavesdropping on whom? The cuckoo clock organ, on the other hand, consisting of electronically controlled cuckoo clocks, is a curious ‘musical theatre’ with six birds and twelve tones. When to open which door and which note to sing has yet to be determined. 73.8 Kilo Ohm shows us that touching each other, pinching each other's noses or pulling each other's ears can also be ‘musical’ acts. The installation, whose steel tubes protrude from the ground like plants, offers almost endless playful possibilities for sound production.

With installations, concerts and performances, Stache has been a guest at many important festivals in Europe as well as in Asia, America and Africa. For GEHEIMNIS 3, his mysterious sound art creatures populate Raffelbergpark.

Portals

Alexander Schubert

In Portals, an impressive space-changing video installation by Alexander Schubert, which we have already developed for GEHEIMNIS 2, four portals open and close. These entrances provide insights into a digitally expanded and virtually overwritten world and make elements of nature digitally visible that would otherwise remain hidden to the analogue eye. The portals also refer to a reality permeated by levels of simulation, which overlays our perceptions as a dazzling surface of economic and spiritual layers.

In his artistic work, Alexander Schubert explores the interplay between digital and analogue worlds. He is a professor at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre.

Das Schweigen der Wälder

KGI – Büro für nicht übertragbare Angelegenheiten

The immersive VR journey about myth and ideology by KGI and Markus Wagner combines documentary material with AI-generated worlds to create an unsettling exploration of what lies hidden in the ‘German forest’. The forest appears as a projection surface for identitarian longings and collective fantasies: from romantic forest solitude to national myths of origin and the dark secrets of its history.

The interdisciplinary Büro für nicht übertragbare Angelegenheiten KGI consists of Maria Vogt, Dominik Meder and Simon Kubisch. They developed this work together with scenographer and 3D designer Markus Wagner.

Linus Ebner

Linus Ebner's large-format work, consisting of nine individual pictures, enlarges a section of Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. The only seemingly peaceful bathing subject becomes a garish, Dionysian excess with an uncertain outcome and at the same time a whipped-up self-portrait in the pool. The picture support, a smeared play mat from the artist's studio, becomes the ultimate site of an autoerotic mishap.

Linus Ebner is also a theatre artist. In the play server, which he is realising together with Toby Stöttner at the Theater an der Ruhr, he transports himself as a painting actor into the shamanic states of cave painting.

Herbsternte

Katharina Huber

An older woman and a young girl. One of them digs knives out of the ground, cleans them and breaks open walnuts with them. The other walks through the forest on her own, guarding a whole collection of knives like a treasure. Do the two have something in common? Why do they need all those blades?

The video loop Autumn Harvest follows the idea of a meditation in which perception deepens and attention sharpens. In her images, the work of award-winning filmmaker and painter Katharina Huber evokes associations with fairy tales and idylls, while at the same time playing with a latent atmosphere of unease, the source of which can never be precisely determined.

The Theatre of Augmented Realities ("Portals" und "Das Schweigen der Wälder") is a research and development project by the Theater an der Ruhr in collaboration with the Academy for Theatre and Digitality and the MIREVI Lab at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of NEUE WEGE.