Till Velten: When Cognitive Order Collapses

At Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Till Velten (b. 1961 in Wuppertal, lives and works in Basel) presents his latest work “Wenn die kognitive Ordnung zerbricht“. The artist’s interest deals with the themes of age, memory and forgetting. Velten sees the personal interview method as “the most fascinating means with which to research the world”.

For his project at Museum Haus Konstruktiv, he conducted dialogs with relatives of dementia sufferers and staff from the dementia competence center Sonnweid in Wetzikon. Their statements are now read by professional voice artists and form an atmospheric tapestry of sound at Haus Konstruktiv: individual words or short fragments of sentences can be heard coming from various speakers.

Velten converts the exhibition space into a walk-through installation, which an acrylic-glass revolving door divides into two zones: one is reminiscent of an enchanting, silvery, glistening winter landscape, while the other half of the hall appears somber and threatening – here, dark shiny panels resembling faces are seen floating, with integrated video recordings of pairs of eyes and lips that seem to move in coordination with the spoken words.