A Body of Water

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The powerful social aspect of Sermon’s work is visualized in the site-specific installation A Body of Water (1999), created for the exhibition Connected Cities, which has an atmosphere that borders on the eerie. In a chroma-key room set up in Duisburg’s Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, visitors mingle virtually with visitors to the second location of the installation: a miners’ changing room, the “Waschkaue,” at a disused mine in Herten. Projected onto one side of a gauzy pyramids of a water screen, images of the Duisberg museum visitors became concrete and realistic presences in the Waschkaue, while onto the other side, historic film material of miners showering is projected. The installation recalls a telematic art classic, Whole in Space (1980) by Kid Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. Initially, it was used quite spontaneously by passers-by but as the exhibition progressed it inspired highly imaginative telecommunication: parties, family reunions, even showing the latest addition to the family to far-of relatives. This strategy of confronting groups of people geographically far apart attains an explosive sociopolitical dimension when people from radically different cultures or social backgrounds encounter each other, almost intimately, in an image space. In the darkness of a derelict industrial building, Paul Sermon created a work whose effect was both evocative and vivid. An imaginary space for remembering generations of miners who, after toiling underground, washed the coal dust from their hard-working bodies there. Thus Sermon adds a dimension of social critique to his visual strategy in this installation with its disturbing intimacy.A site-specific telematic installation linking the shower room of the Ewald/Schlaegel und Eisen mine in Herten with the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. The images of visitors in the shower room in Herten are mixed with images of the Museum visitors in Duisburg and appear on one side of a water screen. Historical film footage of miners showering are projected onto the other side of the water screen. Realised for the Connected Cities Exhibition, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg in Germany, June 20th to August 1st 1999 (catalogue printed).
Paul Semon and Andrea Zapp - June 1999
Photography by Frank Schuberth
Statement by Mathias Fuchs