Mandla Reuter

Is it possible to comprehend and to imagine spaces only from their social and functional sense, without any spatial connotations?

FOUR presents Time Has Ceased Space Has Vanished, an exhibition of new work by Mandla Reuter (born 1974, lives in Berlin). In his installations and architectural interventions Mandla Reuter examines the parameters defining systems and spaces of cultural production and their perception by the viewer and visitor.

In Time Has Ceased Space Has Vanished Mandla Reuter connects loosely four different art works. Already the invitation to the exhibition at FOUR, which is designed by the artist, plays with the expectations of the viewer and standard forms of production. The size is not the expected standard size of A4, but slightly larger. The format of the invitation is based on the size of the photograph on the invitation and brings together two different systems of presentation. The size emphasizes the image as photographic piece of work. The photograph is actually also part of a series, which continues in the exhibition. The sequence documents the view out of a window on a city after sunset, tending towards complete darkness. The photographs fascinate through their deep blackness which accentuates the dark blue of the night. But actually, which city is so dark at night? Shouldn’t the obviously large city on the image create an impressive skyline with coloured neon-lights and all these postcard view glamour?

Darkness is a recurring theme of Time Has Ceased Space Has Vanished at FOUR. Mandla Reuter changed the light switch of the exhibition space, which is now turning off the lights by itself every couple of minutes. The photographs find their equivalent in the space itself. In the growing darkness of the autumn afternoons the main window at FOUR with its view on the city and the river becomes more and more present. The viewer’s perception focuses on the specifics of the room in his urban context. The function of the room as exhibition space fades literally away.

The temporary, becoming darkness of the exhibition space creates also the setting for the fourth and acoustically most present artwork in the exhibition. One can hear the acoustics of a movie, but the visuals are missing. Mandla Reuter leaves the visual part of the movie up to the imagination of the viewer, or his memory, if he recognices the film. The sound played in the room, is not the original movie track, but the recorded sound in a cinema. It is the specific experience of a cinema, which Mandla Reuters tried to record and to re-create at FOUR. The specific perception of the cinema and the perception of the exhibition space with its view on the city shift into each other. While Mandla Reuter focused in earlier works on the architectural perception of space, his recent work tries to remove the architectural aspect of space at all to highlight purposes of spaces and the resulting expectations and functioning.

Mandla Reuter was educated at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main and Parsons School of Design, New York. He has exhibited widely in Europe and America in solo and group exhibitions. In 2006 he curated the exhibition Pigment Piano Marble in Buenos Aires.

Mandla Reuter
Time Has Ceased Space Has Vanished
Kurator: Rene Zechlin