Emanuel Rossetti

The visitor enters a space demarcated by bright red floor-to-wall carpeting. Discreet exits in the walls allow access to the rest of the building, which remains, for the most part, empty. Crossing the carpeted threshold down to the ensuing rooms – including the main exhibition spaces of the Kunsthalle as well as the institution’s lower level – one finds oneself in the twilight zone. Loudspeakers scattered throughout the building emit a drone composition – synthesized hums that stands on the edge of awareness, moved into an audible range. Inside the red room the volume shifts, allowing the sustained sound from beyond to leak in through the apertures. In the back rooms and the lower level, the sound reverberates from one bare wall to another, and the structure of the red room becomes fully apparent, as if one had stepped behind a set. While Delay Dust creates a fully immersive sensory environment, the low-fi objectness of its constituting elements simultaneously gives the viewer the feeling of having stepped into a scale model of the very exhibition he or she is visiting. This passage from one state of experience to the next is both physical and conceptual, and depends on whether one considers the exhibition as an aggregate of distinct objects (the drone, Gallery Bells, the red carpet, a contribution by Georgia Sagri etc.), as a stage for a private sci-fi narrative, or as an abstract display architecture for an exhibition. The exhibition is the medium; the medium becomes a form; the form follows the contours of the memory of past radical gestures.

Emanuel Rossetti was born in 1987. He lives and works in Basel. Previous exhibitions include Brightest Day / Darkest Night, Burning Bridges, New York ; Drip Event, The Power Station, Dallas ; Life & the Invitation& Vapour in Debri&, The Modern Institute, Glasgow ; HAGGARD CARAVAN, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield.

Kunsthalle Bern and the artist would like to thank Marco Papiro, Georgia Sagri, Yael Salomonowitz, Serigraphie Uldry, Anina Troesch, Charles Wolfe and Michi Zaugg.

Delay Dust has been made possible thanks to the generous support of Kultur Stadt Bern, Burgergemeinde Bern and George Foundation, Winterthur.