Twelve installations in black boxes, deputed to explore different phenomena linked to the dark room. From a literal but also (and above all) a figurative point of view. The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Berne stimulates the mind and the senses of the visitors, provoking emotions and making them think. It does not supply an overall view of the latest trends of an artistic current but rather a selection of installations which give reality to the phenomenon of the Black Box in all its theoretical, scientific and anthropological complexity
Travelling across the dark of the night created artificially and fluctuating across the entire exhibition space, the visitors are sucked into new dimensions of time and space, as well as into the fundamental emotive themes in life, which range from anxiety to a sense of isolation – embracing references to sexuality, sleep and death – and a variety of experiences of birth.

The series on this particular artistic world has been possible thanks to the richness of the museum’s property, which includes a bequest from one of the “artists of the black box” par excellence from the early 1800s: the “Transparenten-Kabinett” of the Berne painter Franz Niklaus König. And, from 1987 an installation which represents the paradigmatic example of a black box, built for the exhibition “The Contemporaneity of the Others” by Jürgen Glaesemer: “Fundamental Void” by Eric Orr. To complete the exhibition, on the first of September an international symposium will be held at the museum on the “Black Box”

Until 9 September 2001
Musée des Beaux-Arts
Hodlerstrasse 8-12 3000 Berne 7, Switzerland
Tel. +41-31-3280944; fax +41-31- 3280955

https://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch