Installation Art: Skepticism on the Moon

A three-story house is floating in the air, with roots hanging from its underside – apparently it was ripped from the ground. The sculpture is one of the most memorable exhibits in the “Weightless” exhibition, which the Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich designed exclusively for the Wolfsburg Art Museum. It can be a metaphor for all the uprooted and homeless people who, fleeing wars, persecution and oppression as well as climate catastrophes, hope for a better future somewhere else. Nevertheless, it can also generally represent radically changed circumstances and certainties that have become fragile.

Erlich, born in Buenos Aires in 1973, wants to completely distort our perspective in order to initiate a process of reflection. The main room of the Wolfsburg Art Museum, a very large hall over 20 meters high, is almost dark and is only sparsely lit by the stage spotlights, which are pointedly aimed at three spectacular buildings – a moon, a rocket and the floating house. The artist literally turns our usual geographical conditions upside down: A painted aerial view of a typical European landscape with circled fields of different uses, crossed by roads and rivers, runs across the entire ceiling in the room, i.e. above the viewers’ heads. In contrast, half a moon 20 meters wide grows out of the ground. Also in the room: a 13 meter high silver rocket that can be accessed on two levels. When people at the top move onto the glass surface inside the rocket, to people looking up at the bottom they appear as if they are floating.

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The other physically experienced illusion is located in the accessible interior of the white moon. The sculpture contains a domed room whose floor is mirrored. The space view projected into the dome thus appears reflected on the ground. Visitors who enter the room seem to lose their footing and fall into the deep black of space. The somewhat fashionable term “immersion” describes this effect of diving into another world – actually an ancient phenomenon of illusionistic theater, fairs and circus, which is now unfolding here in the art space. The optical illusion was so convincing at the press conference that some of the participants did not dare to look at the mirror surface. A few stairs higher up in the moon there is a platform from which you can take a look at the entire spatial installation at some height, including the uprooted house hanging in a corner under the ceiling. This is lit from the inside and reveals jumbled furniture from the different positions that can be taken in the room and on a gallery.

Leandro Erlich is much better known in other countries than in Germany. His works have only rarely been seen here, such as nine years ago when his uprooted house hung from a crane above the Karlsruhe market square as part of an exhibition by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Erlich’s first major solo exhibition in Germany is now running in Wolfsburg. Of course, only a financially strong institution could afford to exhibit Erlich’s installations, as they had to be produced over weeks by various companies and numerous specialists. As impressive as the illusionary space is with its irritating effect on perception and perspective and will certainly have a strong effect on children, the reviewer was somewhat skeptical about the immense effort involved. Isn’t the image of the uprooted house already meaningful enough as a two-dimensional motif? Does it really have to be a large object hanging from the ceiling? Is it really necessary to have overwhelming buildings to achieve the illusionistic moments? The fact that the artist works in a completely different way beyond the large productions can be found on the lower level as well as on the gallery of the large hall. An airy white cloud, for example, floating in a display case. And where the upper entrance to the rocket is, there are a few sculptures in small display cases that create a connection between humans and animals to create haunting objects. A snail whose shell has the face of a human brain and whose antennae consist of a clenched human hand with two fingers raised in a victory sign. You don’t necessarily have to know Günter Grass’s “Diary of a Snail” to understand the irony of Leandro Erlich’s sculpture: If the insight into the necessity of changing social conditions continues to occur at a snail’s pace, there is not much reason for the “Victory” – Sign.

“Leandro Erlich: Weightless”, until July 13, 2025, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg