Anlage | Kabine III

In his two-part installation Frank Balve created a room within a room situation, in which he takes concrete spaces of religious life, reduces them to their symbolic objectivity and situates them in a new way to be experienced in the realm of the real.

The viewer is led past the silhouette of a sea of graves towards the small chapel which is found inside the walls of the academy. The crosses in “Anlage” are just as empty and anonymous as in “Kabine III”: the interiour is white, the symbolic meaning of the objects is present while there is a complete absence of their religious legitimation. The estrangement of the objects from their original appearance is created by the choice of material and colour, the cold lighting – these, along with the fence create a clear cut between the main space and its opposing rooms, in turn this causes a tangible tension between the ascertainable objectivity and the transcendental imagery of the evidently artificial room situation.

Due to the disappearance of all traditional planes of meaning Frank Balve consciously transforms this group of works into a surface on which to project any kind of subjective association and thusly ties the viewer into the piece, making them a fixed component of his work. Furthermore, he succeeds in localising the piece into a daily context, making it applicable to the realm in which we exist.