Johan Grimonprez

Year
2009

Medium / Material / Technic
Interactive installation, single-channel video

The interactive installation »BED« is a continuous projection of an empty bedroom. The scale, almost life-sized, creates the illusion of actually looking through the bedroom window. The movements of passers-by or vehicles trigger a sensor, and the empty bedroom transforms unexpectedly and poetically: a deer suddenly jumps onto the bed, stares at the viewer, and disappears.

The culture of reality television has accustomed us to exposed private spaces that play with our voyeuristic desires and has already inspired artists. Johan Grimonprez references Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s billboard work Untitled (1992), a black-and-white photograph of a double bed that was displayed on twenty-four billboards throughout New York City.

The installation operates as an intervention within public space and as an ephemeral gesture crossing the boundaries of reality and fiction, private and public. In our contemporary cityscapes, teeming with commercialized and privatized messages, the work merges elements of intimate space with elements of blunt billboard ads, mixing commercial space with personal poetics.