Jakob Lena Knebl, Ashley Hans Scheirl: Doppleganger!

The project by Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl takes the form of various installations, islands of light that invite the audience to explore “spaces of desire,” in their words. They create an immersive atmosphere that includes carpeting and mirrors through which visitors become part of the exhibition. The scenography draws from the codes of art, design, literature, and sociocultural phenomena while leaning towards humor and the grotesque. The installations blend values, generating a series of tensions and emotions that give the most recognizable sources of their inspiration an “uncanny strangeness” that is both unsettling and intriguing.

References from Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace to Barbapapa, from Hans Bellmer to Luigi Colani, from Hector Guimard to cyber aesthetics, intertwine to create multifaceted works and beings whose transmorphism pushes the boundaries of good taste and representations of identity.

The artists engage in a dialogue with each other, drawing on the prefix “trans”: transmedium, transgender, transmateriality, transcontext – a playful exchange between contemporary creation and the history of art and design, deconstructing the idea of identity as a whole: from mannerism to surrealism, from dark romanticism to biomorphism, and from modernism to postmodernism and vice versa, while opening up to a future of cybernetic existence.