[September 19th 2002]
press release

360° Presence
Jeppe Hein
Opening September 28th, 8.00 p.m

360° Presence
Jeppe Hein
Opening September 28th, 8.00 p.m
Johann König
Weydingerstr. 10
10178 Berlin - Mitte East
Fon: +49 30 30882688
Fax: +49 30 30882690
Tue-Sat 11-7 p.m.
info@johannkoenig.de

On the 28th of September, while ArtForum, the exhibition 360° Presence by Jeppe Hein is opening at Johann König, Berlin. In his interactive installations the Berlin-based danish artist points at the relation between the viewer and the exhibition space, between physical experience, movement and spatial presence. The viewer is a constitutive part of the artwork.

Without the viewer Jeppe Heins "Moving Benches", which at first sight appear to be simple museum benches, wouldn`t move. Only when sat on, the motor hidden inside starts and they slowly cross the exhibition space. Recently Hein showed them at Musuem Ludwig, Cologne.

In the same way the work Jeppe Hein is showing at Johann König depends on the active participation of the viewer. 360° Presence is a 70 cm diameter ball made of steel, which starts moving as soon as someone is entering the gallery space and only stops when the gallery is empty. As long as the movementsensors detect a physical presence in the exhibition room, the ball is continously moving. The gallery visitor has no chance to stop it or to control the direction the ball takes. It knocks the gallery walls, clashes with the radiators and collides with the room`s edges and thereby will, if not destroy, aggressivly mark the white cube.

As in all of Jeppe Hein`s artwork, the main issue is not the ball itself, nor its optical appearence, but the viewer`s physical experience of spatial transformation and the disturbance of the usual function and relation of viewer, artwork and exhibition space. The recipient`s conventions of perception are literally "rolled over" and the 70ties science-fiction movie Rollerball* comes to mind, in which a future society finds its regulative in a brutal game scenario, in which their sports heroes are urged across the arena by an over dimensioned metal ball.

*Norman Jewison, Rollerball (1975) United Atrists