ANTECHAMBER

I am a manikin of tangible humbleness, an orphan from the roadside infrastructure built for the epic and grand future of holding-it- together when things fall apart.*

Before entering any space, state, mode, whatever is next, one is in an antechamber, a preamble to what is usually a house, the main attraction, or the Real.
Claudia Hausfeld explores the antechamber as both an internal and external space of renewal and collapse, a craft of time superimposed in the space of an exhibition, exploring the metaphors between house and body. The scaffolding of this metaphor corresponds with the 206 clay bones (the same amount that a human skeleton is composed of) hollowed out and magnified to reveal a red center. An exploration of materials and surfaces as an antechamber of being, where existence is fractured, becoming, and raw. A possible answer to crucial pondering: How do we access a visceral response before our heads take over with the usual references and conceptual motifs?

The Antechamber conjures the visceral and dismantles wholeness as a room suspended between rupture and revelation. In this antechamber, breaking is intimate, blood and skin meeting thresholds of corporeality. A cyanotype of an Iron Age bog body preserved from 300 BC looms above, magnified beyond life-size. Collages of paintings and artifacts, drawings, and pieces of found industrial infrastructures invite confrontation with fragmentation. Wounds become doors, openings that lead not outward, but inward, each break creating a porous space that redefines becoming as a scaffolding through precarious transmission. This is a space of repeated breaking, where glass and iron, clay and skin all become surfaces that blur and dissolve boundaries.

Here, breaking is ritual, a space of potential collaged from materials: sheets of corrugated iron, silkscreen on glass, photogravure images of bricks that ooze with ink, and glass cartilage, gelatinous and absorbing all the shock of living in not quite rubble.

Erin Honeycutt

*A portion of a riddle found in a publication coinciding with the exhibition, based on conversations between the artist and the writer over the past year.

The Living Art Museum / Nylistasafnið
January 18th - March 2nd 2025

Exhibition structure building: Dorka Csora
Publication design: Amanda Riffo

Thanks to Rúnar Rúnarsson, Sunna Ástþórsdóttir, Odda Júlía Snorradóttir, Jenny Barrett, Kathy Clark, Anne Rombach, Fernanda Fajardo, Alexandra Athanasiadou, Sadie Cook, Gabriel Dunsmith, Berlin Glassworks, Trykkeriet Bergen, Bjartsmiðjan, Í réttum ramma, Stapar cultural center and Lothar & Barbara Hausfeld.