Sanatorium for Aesthetic & Anaesthetic Interventions

Coinciding with the major events of the Art Forum and the Berlin Biennale, the “Sanatorium for Aesthetic and Anaesthetic Interventions” (“Sanatorium für ästhetische und anästhetische Eingriffe”) will open on 1 October 1998 at the Löwenpalais of the Stiftung Starke in Berlin-Grunewald.

This opening presents a project that explores aesthetic border crossings. In terms of media, it comprises installations in the areas of object, photography, sound and video, as well as actions and events.

Anyone who visits the rooms of the sanatorium finds themselves in a “blind spot”, caught between the roles of a detached viewer of art and an involved patient: quirky confusions, double binds and paradoxes, regressive fantasy worlds, joy, fiction and miniaturisation, emptiness, melancholy and cleanness, as well as healing, relief and compensation describe some of the aesthetic and anaesthetic attempts at intervention.

Within these contexts and ambivalences, visitors to the sanatorium experience a tendency towards the dissolution of their aestheticising attitudes of perception and expectation, and are led to reflect on their capacity for sensation in the borderland between aesthetics and anaesthetics.

The project is realised by the Bauhaus Art Company: a group of young artists from the Bauhaus University Weimar and Prof. Elfi Fröhlich. Installations, actions and events by Martin Brandau, Nine Budde, Nicole Degenhardt, Andreas Hillmann, Wolfgang Hofmann, Stefanie Klekamp, Jens Kloppmann, Tobias Kraft, Franziska Lamprecht, Petra Peter, Ronny Pohl, Natascha Rossi, Silvia Rottenberger and Annekathrin Schreiber.