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Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer

Ana Maria Tavares

Solo exhibition

26 August – 4 November 2001
Vleeshal (Map)
Vleeshal Zusterstraat (Map)

Curator: Rutger Wolfson

Ana Maria Tavares, 'Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer', exhibition view, 2001 | Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer | Ana Maria Tavares

The first major solo showing of the Brazilian artist Ana Maria Tavares in Europe.
Ana Maria Tavares (1958 Belo Horizonte) lives and works in Sao Paulo. Drawing from art, architecture and design, her work comments on that form of public space also known as non-space. Examples of non-spaces are airports, underground stations, waiting rooms and motorways: spaces that have no relationship whatsoever with the specific historical or cultural identity of their surroundings. Their uniformity renders non-spaces everywhere in the world highly interchangeable: the waiting room of a Frankfurt bus terminal could just as well be in Los Angeles – and vice versa.

Tavares designed her installation 'Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer' especially for De Vleeshal. An enormous wall of mirrors at one end of the space and a sloping mirror surface on the floor made De Vleeshal appear immeasurably large. At the other end of De Vleeshal, a huge video projection showed a journey through a virtual underground space that could be anything from a station, a stadium to an airport. The stainless steel objects placed in De Vleeshal had a confusing and ambiguous functionality. The seats made you wonder what you should be waiting for; the handles begged the question: why hold onto something? All this, and the cordless headphones playing a soundtrack of airport sounds, undermined viewers’ sense of time and place in much the same way as happens in non-spaces. Thus viewers became trapped passengers, compelled by their unsettled senses to critically re-examine their surroundings.

Ana Maria Tavares’ exhibition 'Numinoso' at the Kabinetten van De Vleeshal ran concurrently with 'Middelburg Airport Lounge with Parede Niemeyer' at De Vleeshal. In 'Numinoso', words including 'credit card', 'sparkling water', 'sexo' (sex) and 'lexotan' (a type of sleeping pills) refer to the way we try to escape the pressure of everyday reality through aspiring a state of detachement. In a haze of sex or sleeping pills, through traveling, through luxury and consumption - or through art.