Up or down? The question could evoke eschatological anxiety or just another day at the office. Gabriele Garavaglia’s “Liftcore” deploys the elevator motif to accentuate the surreality of the mundane, ultimately resulting in a kind of dizzying stasis. The Museum im Bellpark, a century-old suburban villa, contains four elevator frontispieces that range from hell gateall works 2023, in standard skyscraper steel, to Amnesiaa Cor-Ten dovetail monstrosity straight out of David Fincher Alien 3. Each is hung flush so that their categorization as art object or scenography is unstable in a way that defies the strangeness of someone like Robert Gober. Embedded in walls and ceiling, Dials are logically programmed, steel-clad displays that appear as floor indicators. Some rise constantly, suggesting the number of unseen stories; some descend endlessly; and we settle down apparently wherever he pleases. Nowhere in the entire exhibit, which looks like both twisted reality and a highly produced showroom, is there no button to press. Like IRL, you can wait forever to be swept away to something else or for it to happen. Garavaglia’s earlier work has inserted subtle, possible but improbable changes to exhibition spaces and events, for example, visitors with black irises at a vernissage and a trailing snake in a toilet. These glitches have accentuated the latent structures and fears of societies. The artist’s impossibilities here stoke class anxieties and ambitions while twisting the promise of transporting the auratic masterpieces that museums typically display. If only mobility news were so attractive, or unreal.
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