“What has been begun may be fulfilled. May they believe in it and have a laugh at their passions. For what they call passion is, in truth, not some emotional energy but just the friction between the soul and the outside world,” proclaims the main character in Andrei Tarkowski’s 1979 film Stalker. Lori Hersberger may have envisaged a society set in an indefinite future and characterized by repressive control when he conceived his installation Dystopia Stalker No. 2. Yet, the artist does not want to elicit an unequivocal reading with the title he chose but rather aims at triggering a cascade of associations on the part of the viewer – an objective already evident in former comparable works such as Optimize Your Feng-Shui (2008), Geist (2009), or Dystopia Stalker (2013). With a painter’s vital gesture, Hersberger decided on a screen-like arrangement of the bulletproof glass walls, which may arouse our suppressed latent fascination with the beauty of destruction. The installation’s accessibility turns the viewer into an integral part of the overall tableau, which continuously oscillates between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. New things may come about where destruction reigns.

Cathérine Hug
Curator, Kunsthaus Zürich

http://www.lorihersberger.com/ (28.02.2022)