LIMBUS, 2024
aluminum, galvanized steel, rotary motor, media player, speakers, sound composition (15:30 min.), light settings
Dimensions variable

Installation view DISPLAY, Parma / IT
March 5 - May 3, 2024
Curated by Ilaria Monti

To go against systems and forms of control, to really live and not only survive the physical and existential spaces of everyday life. To move on and break free, celebrating the uncertain.

Clemens Tschurtschenthaler develops his own theory of doubt and limbo, drawing inspiration from the homonymous scenario of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, where innocent souls are destined to linger, suspended in time. On the restless edge of this cyclical and nebulous space, the artist crafts a landscape of contradictions, creating a confusing atmosphere in which perceptions overlap and blend. The work, conceived as a traversable self-supporting structure rotating around itself, clearly recalls urban architectures, devices and spaces, with a reference to security turnstiles which regulate access in stations, metros, banks, and others public buildings. The well-known concept of „non-place”, introduced by Marc Augé to describe contemporary spaces of transience and passage where all forms of connections are anonymous, here is reversed into a place which instead is receptive to human and emotional experiences. A three-part sound composition produced by the artist accompanies and guides the interaction with the work; emergence, interruption and reprise, it marks the rhythms of the space articulating a dynamic environment, wrapped in the eternal loop of circular time.

LIMBUS functions as gateway to nothingness, as if it was placed on a threshold that, when crossed, doesn‘t cause any physical changes, it rather generates unease, dystopian absence, doubts, hopes, flows of consciousness:

what to leave behind
what to expect next
what to do before
where to go and when,
when to return. 

The installation translates a psychological state ruled by uncertainty, into spatial movement and physical perception: the experience of and within the space of the artwork represents a prelude to an upside-down world, where a tool designed to control leads to collapse, where distinctions between inside and outside vanish in a loop – in here, a step made forward brings you back to the start, to ground zero. It is, perhaps, on the brink of this erratic roaming that illusions were born, along with metaphysic attempts to explain the world or imagine a new one. To makes sense of this roaming and to their fate, humans created myths and places of afterlife. As if to explore and restore those timeless expectations and feelings, Clemens Tschurtschenthaler accentuates the repetition of gestures, sounds, and forms to induce disorientation. His work is an invitation to wander within a space-time capsule, on the margins of silent private turmoil.

Exhibition text by Ilaria Monti

With the kind support of the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sports Republic of Austria and the Department of Cultural Affairs from the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Italy