Passage from “Short term utopias” by Ory Dessau



“Either mounted directly on the wall or placed inside a plexiglass case, Anneke Eussen’s formally varying, provisional constructions of layered glass elements are a self-referential proposition highlighting the physical conditions in which they are made, displayed and perceived. Combining recycled dusty panes with untouched tailored ones, each glass construction is a double feature, an inexhaustible bidirectional movement, in the course of which the frame, the glass elements, and the wall merge into and separate from one another. The to and fro movement performed by Eussen’s glass constructions provides them with temporality, turning their space into an event in time. In the works, the means of display become the displayed objects, outside becomes inside, transparency becomes opacity. Eussen’s glass constructions mark the shift from a transparent to an opaque field of vision, and as a consequence, from a clear to an inaccessible view of the world. Most of the dusty glass panes were found in an abandoned factory, lending the strictly phenomenological character of the works a narrative quality that infuses the experience of ‘here and now’ with aspects of ‘there and then.’ Eussen’s glass constructions not only deconstruct conventional modes of display, they also summon the imprints of the sights that were seen through the windowpanes they recycle and the lives of those who saw them. In this sense the recycled glass panes are like relics—traces of what has been long gone—or rather, flat crystal balls evoking past time chronologies. Almost all the glass constructions are titled. The titles given by Eussen can serve as a key to the meaning of that which otherwise defies meaning. For a 2020 series of nine encased glass constructions made of both dusty and transparent panes, Eussen chose the title Adding the Blank Pages. The title defines her layered arrangements as an act of adding, accumulating, piling. It also emphasizes the fundamental emptiness and lack which the glass constructions enact, describing them as blank. However, at the same time, the title signifies the panes as pages, i.e., as a potential medium of inscription. As layered pages, the series implies a unified ground to which it was once, and maybe will be again, bound. Nowadays, the term ‘blank pages’ is likewise associated with computer programs of textual outputs. As such it allows us to relate to Eussen’s glass constructions as an effect of materialization of what was previously virtual; as a response to the digital communication systems to which we are subjected.”