Passage
AVPD is the Danish artist duo Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing. For Karriere, they have created a passage within a passage. No, that wasn’t a slip of the pen – the artwork comprises a doubling or a mirroring of a passage. There are toilet facilities at either end of Karriere. At the southern end they comprise a set of small cubicles along a passage. AVPD has doubled the number of doors in the passage, creating a somewhat confusing labyrinthine architectural structure. Some doors are open and lead to toilet cubicles, others are closed, while others still lead to yet other doors and you find yourself going round in a circle. Confusion is inevitable and, depending on temperament and how desperate you are to use the facilities, this will prompt slight irritation or panic. But what is intriguing is the intensity of the physical response to a space that is not as we had anticipated. The sanitary facilities at Karriere are, admittedly, constructed from the cheapest standard materials we could find. They include mass-produced doors, door handles, toilets, taps, and so on. In that sense the corridor is as nondescript and featureless as similar spaces in other public and commercial buildings. The confusion provoked by not finding what we had expected is experienced as a loss of control, where the roles between object and subject are reversed: the space becomes the subject and you become the object. It is as though the space is looking at you, while you, for your part, look back at something you hadn’t noticed before. (PKE)
Aslak Vibæk, born 1974, Denmark
Peter Døssing, born 1974, Denmark