empty seats, 2022
About 5000 replicated airplane tickets of different airlines, patafix glue pads, 1100 × 1.5 × 547 cm / Termial, Terminal
The solo exhibition Terminal, Terminal, is a site-specific installation for the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne.
The main work empty seats remains grounded – consciously and symbolically. In the central nave of the church, she collects thousands of individual airline tickets and boarding passes. The faithfully reproduced documents bear witness to holiday trips on budget airlines, journeys in First Class, intercontinental long-haul flights – and historical events that have become part of our collective memory, such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Each of these tickets represents a personal fate: for example, that of the 298 passengers on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down by Russian forces over eastern Ukraine in 2014. Or that of 21-year-old Elin Ersson, who refused to take her seat on the flight from Gothenburg to Turkey in 2018, with the aim of preventing the deportation of asylum seekers to Afghanistan. They tell of crashes, deportation, escape, hijacking, pilot suicides and other disasters, but also of record-breaking frequent flyers like K. Ullas Kamath from India and airlines like Virgin Atlantic Airlines, whose crew members are allowed to wear the uniform that best matches their gender identity.
Through meticulous research work these individual fates and boarding pass designs were compiled, creating the large-scale floor work empty seats in the form of the popular Batman symbol.
With the distress signal familiar from DC Comics, the church not only brings together the profane and the sacred, and the fictional and the real. Rather, the work points to power and powerlessness within our system determined by capital and privilege.
Bruce Wayne, who watches over Gotham City, owes his superiority not to superhuman powers but to technical innovations and the financial force of his family business Wayne Enterprises, which makes billions in profits in the arms, oil and pharmaceutical industries, among others.
As with real-life billionaires cum space tourists like Elon Musk and Virgin founder Richard Branson, the boundaries between personality cult, philanthropy and megalomania are blurred.
Curator: Anne Mager
Photo: Bozica Babic, Brigitte Dunkel, Selma Gültoprak
Installation view: Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln // Kirche der Jesuiten