2010
scaffolding, white fabric
6 slide projectors and
program unit
4 monitors and DVD player
Concept, Art Work, Sketches
Dina Boswank
Curators of the exhibition
Dr. Michael Korey,
Thomas Ketelsen
Assistance
Felix Adler
3D model
Claudia Bergmann
Graphics
Karen Weinert
Photography / Credits
Felix Adler, Herbert Boswank
and Dina Boswank
Sketches and Renderings
Dina Boswank and Markus Tauber
[This is an excerpt of my text „Der Tempel als Installation, Projekt und Projektionen im Dresdner Zwinger“ as part of the publication „Fragments of Memory: The Temple of Solomon in the Zwinger of Dresden. Facets of a Baroque Model and an Early Jewish Museum“, Hrsgb. Michael Korey, Thomas Ketelsen, Deutscher Kunstverlag, München und Berlin 2010.]
In the present case it reproduces something that is itself a model. A model reproduces something that reproduces something, which is and was contested. Interpretations of the Temple pointed in the past, and point all the more so now, in all directions.
The reductionist power of models has, of course, great potential, especially when one manages to direct this power to not only avoid empty spaces.
Perhaps one must choose to leave some things absent in order to be able to see other things at all.
What role did the Wallpavillon play as an exhibition space for one of the most important objects in the court collections? How were objects presented then, and how are they presented now?
Hearing a marble roll down the steps of a miniature spiral staircase was seen in the Baroque age as an impressive proof of the level of detail with which the Temple model had been constructed. Even the things that one cannot see directly are a perfect reproduction of the putative, biblical paradigm. What is invisible determines the value of what one can see. Some years ago, a film was produced in Hamburg, that is now shown on a monitor alongside the Temple model in the municipal history museum there. With the help of a tiny camera, the interior colonnades and even the Holy of Holies (the place in which the Ark of the Covenant once stood) within the model were filmed. These regions are actually not visible to the museum visitor today. Slowly and deliberately the camera moves through the model, and its wide-angle lens conveys a floating and surreal impression.
Seeing such interior details alters the value of the object displayed next to the screen. The image on the monitor leaves behind less space for curiosity, as it appears „prettier“ and livelier than the model itself.
In the installation six slide projectors each show, in a cycle of 20 minutes, 80 slides of details of the digital Temple model‘s facade, its polygonal components, or parts of so-called surface mappings.
Changing their images at various rates, the projectors create a composition and produce at the same time a typical clicking rhythm. This sound picks up the Baroque represenational idea of the rolling marble and creates a bridge to the fragments of the Temple model on display in the New Green Vault, where one of the extant spiral staircases from the Hamburg model is to be shown, accompanied by the recorded sound of a marble rolling down its miniature steps. The experience of the model is thus augmented by an aural element.
The basis for the projections is a scaffolding tower covered in half-transparent white fabric that rises some 8 m high almost to the ceiling of the Wallpavillon, obscuring one of its chandeliers. Behind the fabric screen is the clicking, hot image-producing machinery projecting the slides on various sides of the tower. The points of light emanating from the projector lenses and as well the scaffolding itself are visible through the fabric and convey a sense of the tower‘s interior outside - as seeing the restaurator‘s work repeating endlessly.
To conclude, four monitors take place next to the tower: Looped videos run on these monitors, all of which relate to the Baroque architectural model of the Temple, the forms of its representation, and its absence. One of the monitors expands the otherwise purely visual approaches by presenting a series of interviews with theorists (f.ex.: Kai Voeckler, „The absence of architecture“, 2010).