‘After the Curtain’ is a light installation consisting of 242 screens from broken laptops, sourced from computer shops around the artist’s studio in South East London. Each screen has been painstakingly cleaned and connected to a power supply, creating a wall of translucency that emit light but no information.

The work is part of a wider series of site-specific installations using modified LED screens that has seen the artist exhibit outside—where the screens were powered by the sun—in art galleries and the front window of a phone shop in Peckham. In this installation, the formation of the screens responds to the 1960s architecture of the former Debenhams store in which it is installed, mirroring the symmetry, functional lines and grid-like organisation of the facade. Reminiscent of an advertising billboard, or phone or television window displays, the work points at the hidden prevalence of screen-based devices— objects we regularly look through and into, but rarely at.

The title ‘After the Curtain’ refers to the temporary emptiness of the Debenhams building, which the artist likens to the time between plays, when the stage is cleared and reset. In itself a large, electronic curtain, the work makes a feature of the swinging cables, plugs and sockets that power it, finding them not unlike a draped piece of fabric.

Material Curing was an exhibition curated by artist Reinis Lismanis 
featuring works in film, installation, painting, photography and sculpture by Katrin Hanusch, Celeste McEvoy, James William Murray, Ieva Raudsepa and Tilo & Toni. The show was open to the public at Thames-Side Studios, London in November 2021.


You can read the full press release here ︎︎︎

Katrin Hanusch’s The Romance is the third in a series of alchemical works with disused laptop screens.

Though ubiquitous the screens of our electronic devices remain largely invisible – something we look through and into, but rarely at. Our attention is held by what they display and transmit rather than by the screen itself. These damaged screens, previously unnoticeable because of their smooth functioning, announce their presence when they cease to work, becoming suddenly visible.

Removed and repaired in shops like All About Laptops, in whose window we now find The Romance, they form a part of the physical detritus of our supposedly dematerialised digital lives; skins now shed to expose their insides.

Apparently all alike, the unique and personal qualities of each screen are brought to the fore by their adjacency. With information stripped away their haptic character is exposed: bent, broken, marked, scratched – their journeys through the world take their toll, and here they become material again.

Through the artist’s handling they become transmitters of only light. The synthetic glow of the screens reveals an array of subtleties in tone and quality. A pallet of colours emerges. Complexity emerges from the combination of simple elements.

Organic lines inscribed by cables tumble, swing and sag gesturally against the framework of screens: A grid of noisy digital apparatuses brought to silence and then allowed to speak on their own terms.

The titles of the works in Hanusch’s series are suggestive of the energy and potential which the artist finds in these rejected items: The Return, The Magic (both 2018) and now The Romance. While The Magic was shown in a gallery space, and The Return in the Spanish wilderness, The Romance is sited in a busy South London shopping street, amidst architecture, commerce, daily lives and the concentration of people, traffic and noise.

Each articulation of this series shares commonalities and marks differences with the others. Each iteration communicates with a different audience, putting something different out into the world and maybe (hopefully?) getting back a different response. Each version sets into play a different set of social and aesthetic relations. Each is a call looking for a response. Each is a question, posed with a sense of uncertainty and risk.

Modularity gives a certain internal propulsion – once a process gets going it can gather momentum and take on a self-perpetuating continuity. This gives the artist impetus to see where it leads and what might be found out by following it.

Working with material in this way affects a small intervention into the flow of things: an attempt to meet the material on its level and see how we might interact with it and respond to it. Something might be revealed in the objects, or the objects might reveal something in us. We meet in the middle when we remember that our bodies are material things, moving in a world of objects whose inner being we can never really understand or access.

In Hanusch’s work, ultimately, the material must lead the way. The process becomes about seeing what can be unlocked, allowing the material to speak, observing it, listening to it and at some point, letting it be.

The grid-like formality echoes the work of Agnes Martin, whose desire to remove the ego from the artwork is also instructive. By clearing away noise, Hanusch allows for an experience with the material – a visual nowhere that creates space for contemplation.

These slow fallings apart, and then these sudden ones, incredibly quick, like sudden gusts of wind. Then quiet. The big crack with its big light, then the slow imperceptible avalanche, and then these sudden fallings apart. And then the stones, grey like the fog, but still with a faint light in them instead of nothing, a little of nothing's light, so weak, so almost like ashes, so almost like glowing ashes on stone. And then the stone on stone. I am in the room behind the wall the stones are laid in, my stones, other people's stones, and there's light in there, the strong invisible light that comes across from the sky and around the stones. The light of nothingness. The light of nothingness in the stone. The light of love in the stone.

For Twilight (Prototype) I delaminated damaged LED laptop screens and used its backlit LED panel seperate from the sandwiched glass sheets that had shown image and information in the past. The cracks on the inside of the glass display allow the liquid crystal to travel more freely between its casing, revealing greens, purples, blues, pinks, and black. Soldered together they form two glass panes in the installation that remind of stained glass like window elements.

Twilight (Prototype) was shown during Material Curing, an exhibition curated by artist Reinis Lismanis featuring works in film, installation, painting, photography and sculpture by Katrin Hanusch, Celeste McEvoy, James William Murray, Ieva Raudsepa and Tilo & Toni. The show was open to the public at Thames-Side Studios, London in November 2021.


You can read the full press release here ︎︎︎