EVENT: ALONA RODEH: INTERZONE (NOVEMBER 9 - MARCH 2 2025, GELSENKIRCHEN, GERMANY)
Alona Rodeh
Interzone
November 9, 2024–March 2, 2025
Opening: November 8, 7pm
Light performance: November 8, 8:30pm, The Mood Organ, on the façade of Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen
Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen
Horster Straße 5-7
D-45897 Gelsenkirchen
Germany
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–6pm
press release
Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen is pleased to present to an exhibition with new works by the Berlin-based artist Alona Rodeh (b. 1979). In her largest museum exhibition to date, the artist delves into a new medium with numerous computer-generated works, while intensifying her years-long inquiry into the architecture of light in public spaces. The exhibition title, Interzone, is a nod to the eponymous location of William S. Burroughs’s book Naked Lunch and describes a threshold state in which the laws of physics, social commitments, and societal structures have become unhinged.
The artist has taken over the entire basement of the museum to stage a sonic and visual spatial installation inspired by the nocturnal city. In doing so, she draws on the pictorial language of science fiction and the narrative style of computer games. The works, created in a gaming engine, tie in with the museum’s stimulating architecture to create night-time fictional spaces inhabited by surreal, autonomous, and, in part, absurd machines. In Rodeh’s choreography of light, sound, and movement we encounter e-scooters that put on a light show, ATMs spewing banknotes, a dump site surveilled by a swarm of drones, and more.
Alona Rodeh, Wasted, 2024. Production still from computer game. © Alona Rodeh, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2024.
Embedded in hyper-realistic digital narrative worlds, Rodeh’s works illuminate processes that play significant roles in contemporary urban landscapes, and particularly in the local context: unregulated transactions of capital, post-industrial urbanity, automated mobility concepts, surveillance and obfuscation, as well as the ecological crisis. Also included in the works she has produced for Gelsenkirchen are, for the first time, two interactive video games designed for multiple users. With them, the artist builds an active connection to the interactive sections of the museum’s kinetic collection.
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