Cosmosauger: installation by Sonja Vordermaier

Cosmosauger consists of tubes made from the endless tube type raw material of white women stockings (the stronger material used for heels, sowed to a smaller diameter), filled with paper and an outer layer of cotton wool which has been unevenly sprayed with a metallic grey-blue paint. Tubes end in the common household device used for clearing blocked outlets, the rubber "sucker", their wooden handles worked into the tube.

Tubes start at windows, walls etc. and wind their way to other walls and windows. A few of them end at the central piece of the installation made up of two used enamel tubs with hydraulic lid and leather cushion, an item which figures as a kind of relaxation chamber or deep-freeze container for light-years of travel. The upper tub has two plasic windows which offer a view of a polyptych of photos showing an underwater scene. Some tubes are linked together by an interface made up of two 'suckers' which rather look like synapses.

Sonja Vordermaier is aware of the works by Rebecca Horn that use a meandering maze of tubes or trees of tubes ending in funnels (which came to my poorly conditioned mind), but stresses the ironic and low-key aspects of her installation. She likes the older science fiction movies which have few visual effects and leave it to the spectator to fill the gaps with his or her imagination.

She is pleased to see that the installation seems to invite very diverse interpretations. Asked whether she thought about having nodes where more than two tubes meet, she said that this would appear to her to be too organic. The tubes are in a practical sense modular: they can be removed and used again in some other venue. The way they end at the 'shop window' as dark blobs listening to the outside was perhaps most striking.