Alwin Lay &
Amidst the bustling everyday life in the Bonn pedestrian zone, an image motif, with a touch of the hyperreal due to the extreme enlargement, steers the gaze to the display windows of a shop. Printed on transparent photo foil, ammunition for toy guns is recognisable in a larger-than-life close-up. The depiction of this martial requisite from a children’s room forms the membrane of a spatial display, in which a flying object flits about a stage-like scenery of flat screen monitors – accompanied by a repetitive pop-ambient track paying reverence to the 1980s Queen hit I Want to Break Free.
In the space installation Tensions (Break Free) (2025), conceived of specifically by Alwin Lay for VIDEONALE.20, static and animated pictorial elements rehearse the act of liberation from the limits of their own medium announced in the title of the work. Oscillating between image and copy, the blank cartridges are almost carnivalesquely reminiscent of »smoking guns«, while the drone, omnipresent in military contexts, evokes real war scenarios.
Alwin Lay, who primarily works with photography and animation in his conceptual, media-reflexive works, challenges the expectations of recipients in his expansive installations, site-specific interventions or artist publications, in that he allows photographic apparatus and profane objects to develop their own astonishing dynamic. Tensions (Break Free) transforms the shop in the Friedrichstraße 16-18, temporarily used as an exhibition space, into an oversized light box, in which real space and pictorial space merge with one another and the drone milling around on its initially seemingly unpredictable flight path above the monitors arranged in the space inevitably heads toward its narrative climax. (Heike Ander)
*This work is a new production for VIDEONALE.20.
