PROFOUND FASCINATION (2008)
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2008 / site-specific installation / Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (CH) / metal / 250 × 210 × 75 cm
This sculpture was made for the exhibition ‘dragged down into lowercase’, a concept devised by curator Clémentine Deliss and artist Oscar Tuazon. It was presented in an outdoor exhibition space designed by Oscar Tuazon: a triangular excavated structure with a 3-metre-high wall built from local timber cut into boards by UK artists Heather and Ivan Morison. Profound Fascination is a 1-metre exposed entrance down under. The entrance to an underground hideout, which would otherwise be easily accessible, now becomes difficult to enter because of the excavation and the lowered ground floor.
‘In parallel, certain artworks and theoretical positions dig below the surface typologies and hierarchies of human interaction to expose the foundation for survival as the nurturing of conceptual and existential emancipation. Van Wolputte’s bunker-like cavity is perhaps the most sinister of all the contributions. As an intervention into Tuazon’s excavation, it appears to keep striving to retrieve something from where it cannot be found, pulling the observer into a rusty hole.’
Clémentine Deliss (2008)