Anneke Eussen 

Whether mounted directly on the wall or placed inside a Plexiglas display case, Anneke Eussen’s formally varied, provisional constructions of layered glass elements constitute a self-reflexive proposition that emphasizes the physical conditions in which they are created, exhibited, and perceived. By combining recycled, dusty panes with pristine, custom-cut ones, each glass construction is a double act, an inexhaustible two-way movement in which the frame, the glass elements, and the wall merge and then separate again. The back-and-forth movement performed by Eussen’s glass constructions lends them a temporality and transforms their space into an event in time.

In these works, the means of presentation themselves become the objects being presented; the outside becomes the inside, transparency becomes opacity. Eussen’s glass structures mark the shift from a transparent to an opaque field of vision and, consequently, from a clear to an inaccessible view of the world.

Most of the dusty glass panes were found in an abandoned factory, which lends the strictly phenomenological nature of the works a narrative dimension that imbues the experience of the “here and now” with aspects of the “there and then.” Eussen’s glass constructions not only deconstruct conventional exhibition practices; they also evoke the traces of the gazes that once looked out through the recycled panes and the lives of those who saw through them. In this sense, the recycled panes are like relics—traces of what has long since vanished—or rather flat crystal spheres that evoke past times.

Almost all of the glass structures have a title. The titles Eussen chooses can serve as a key to the meaning of what would otherwise elude interpretation. For a series of nine enclosed glass structures from 2020, made from both frosted and transparent panes, Eussen chose the title *Adding the Blank Pages*. The title defines their layered compositions as an act of adding, collecting, and stacking. At the same time, it emphasizes the fundamental emptiness and absence that the glass structures represent, by describing them as blank. On the other hand, the title refers to the panes as pages, that is, as a potential medium for inscription. As layered pages, the series suggests a common foundation to which they were once—and perhaps again—connected. Nowadays, the term “blank pages” is also associated with computer programs that generate textual output. In this sense, it allows us to understand Eussen’s glass constructions as a materialization of what was previously virtual; as a response to the digital communication systems to which we are subjected.

Orry Dessau