A PRIVATE COLLECTION: Alexandra Hopf

VITRINE Bermondsey Square presents the first UK solo presentation of Berlin artist Alexandra Hopf’s installation and film works. The gallery will host a site-specific installation accompanied by a cinema screening of Hopf’s films ‘…oder sollte dies eine unbekannte Mauer sein?’ and ‘Future Show’.

Working with the unique aspects of the 16 metre long window gallery positioned on the public square, Hopf reverses the function of the window display by introducing a curtain across the space and obscuring the viewers gaze; raising questions about private and public space. The installation continues the artist’s “ongoing investigation into objects of art that have vanished from the field of vision” (future show, 2009/10) and focuses on the dialectics of desire and displacement.

Working with video, painting and objects, Hopf reconstructs the avantgarde within her own museological approach. The installation series “Future Show” for instance, draws on Surrealist modes of display formulated by designer Friedrich Kiesler, recruiting it as an allegory for contemporary display, artifice and the generation of desire. The video work “…. oder sollte dies eine unbekannte Mauer sein?” („… or should this be an unknown wall?”) resembles an archive of pictures, combining style icons of design and architecture, archive photos of twentieth century theatre and film, as well as scientific recordings in the staging of a lucid dream. The individual images are sequenced and blended together so as to produce additional after images.