We are confronted by a painstakingly assembled architectural and sculptural structure that paraphrases and modifies the space and its meaning, and whose dimensions, forms, materials and images allude to other existing places and ideas. The exhibition space and objects are configured and interrelated with great conceptual and formal precision. At the center, we enter a chamber whose floor plan and scale correspond to those of Mucha’s Düsseldorf studio and whose interior walls are occupied by 27 showcases. These wallmounted sculptures contain the entire studio floor, cut into sections and rotated into the vertical, like pictures. Each piece shows traces left by the artist’s life and work, and blocks the view into the showcase’s interior. In addition to traces of an individual history, this Floor of Facts records the industrial history of the building from which it originated, which was formerly the headquarters of the Düsseldorfer Eisenbahnbedarf AG (Düsseldorf Railway Equipment Corp.). By analogy, the outer shell of the chamber corresponds to the travertine floor of the German Pavilion. The video monitors added to the work at various places in 2002 show photographic documents that illustrate these references while underscoring the work’s formal interplay with the architecture of the German Pavilion. The same holds for the documentary cross-references in the total of 13 animated films to the photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher on view in Venice.

The walls surrounding this central cell are fitted with a further 38 showcases, each harboring a found footstool – an ironic allusion to the pavilion’s portal and architecture – together with a bronze cast of it, set in precarious balance. On closer scrutiny, the rough casts call to mind the processes of heavy industry, coal and steel, an allusion significant for Germany, especially the state of North Rhine-Westfalia. The artist’s showcase, an element charged with a pathos seemingly appropriate to the noble occasion of the presentation, is a type of frame that invites contemplation of unprepossessing things and itself becomes an object of contemplation. The glass fronts reflect the museum space and the viewer, and the sense of depth they evoke alludes to the situation and function of the museum as a site of visual perception and a repository of historic memory. The combination of elements amounts to an interplay of real and constructed spaces, spaces of function, memory, and contemplation. The title of the work, Das Deutschlandgerät, derives from an eponymous product manufactured by Maschinenfabrik Deutschland AG, a branch of the Hoesch Corporation of Dortmund. This piece of special equipment, still in use worldwide, is a heavy-duty hydraulic hoist designed to lift extremely heavy loads, such as entire prefabricated bridges, or to set derailed train cars or engines back on the tracks. In the context of the transition period after 1989, the title additionally alluded to the political situation in Germany, and could be understood as an ironic commentary on the symbolic role of the German Pavilion at the Biennale. __

(Translation from German by John W. Gabriel)