page_title: Iris Häussler
section_title: Non-fictional Art Works
hierarchical_section_title: Iris Häussler / Non-fictional Art Works
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the installation "On Loan" by Iris Häussler, Potsdam near Berlin, 1995. Borrowed showcases present pieces of laundry, temporarily removed from their usage cycles in a local orphanage, a home for the disabled, a hospital, a retirement home and a prison.
context_page_description: Iris Haeussler is a conceptual and installation art artist of German origin. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Many of Iris Haeussler's works are detailed, hyperrealistic installations that visitors can decode as narrative stories. Recurring topics in her work include historic, cultural and social origins, such as family ties and relationships, and physical conditions, such as geography architecture and housing.
context_section_description: Archivio (1991) was created within Milano's annual festival of the arts, Milano Poesia, curated by Gianni Sassi. Haeussler had begun work with wax, exploiting its translucency by encasing objects or documents, an act of protection and removal. "Archivio" was an exhibition of process, a performance in which she collected daily newspaper clippings for the duration of the MILANO POESIA festival, cast them into thin slabs of wax on-site, and ordered them into a large steel shelf. Visitors browsed through the slabs, rearranging them, breaking some; over the duration of the show the archive was transformed into a collection of disorder. Archivio was reinstalled a year later in Prague. The act of encasing objects in wax would remain a theme in her work to this date. Examples are stacks of wax-tablets that encase the laundry of children and adults, arranged into constellations of family relationships, or panels of gauze-curtains and dresses in which the fabrics' color and texture shimmers through the enclosing wax matrix; they appear as large, ethereal paintings.
  Paidi (1994), a gallery show at the Kunstraum, Munich, Germany contained more than 200 passport-size images of infants, taken between 1905 and the present, juxtaposed with 280 samples of mother's milk the artist had collected from nursing mothers. The installation explored how location, social conditions and history define biographies from day one.
  Huckepack (1995: Piggyback) was a hotel intervention in which Häussler installed the personal belongings of a traveling woman into a room of a downtown hotel in Leipzig,"Huckepack" -  Germany. Germany. Guests were offered an upgrade into this room, if they agreed to share their space with this fictitious person. They were confronted with one of the beds being unmade and a silk-pyjama left on site, one of the towels having been used, an open suitcase with personal items on the dresser, all conspiring to create a virtual, yet tangible physical presence. Although the piece comes with a disclaimer - the guests realize that they are part of an artwork for a night - the intrusion is disorienting and sidesteps confrontation; in the words of curator Klaus Werner: "All attempts to unveil the mysterious stranger lead into autobiography."
  Leihgaben (1995: On Loan) presented laundries, pillowcases and bedsheets Haeussler collected from institutions - an orphanage, a hospital, a prison - to remove them for a short while from their cycles of use. "Acceptance and the appearance of a human dimension came [...] from an unexpected direction, when the bedridden inhabitant of a nursing home stated: I am proud to have my nightgown shown in an exhibition." - such engagement of participants through their unique biographies is characteristic of many of her works.
  Xenotope (1994, 1997, 1998, 2000) was a small series of projects that provided temporary overnight accommodation. The first Xenotop in Leipzig furnished a spartan room with bed, desk, TV, towels and bottled water, all painted in a uniform light-grey. Visitors registered at the gallery and received the key for one night, to be spent without further direction or observation. "The only cost is to absorb the emptiness." Variations of this theme were shown in Bonn, Munich and Friedrichshafen.
  Repla©e (1997) A piece of Institutional Critique - was a response to an invitation to a "Blind Date" with Maria Lindberg, by curators Susanne Gaensheimer and Maria Lind. Haeussler sent a non-artist substitute in her place, a scientist who filled the large studio at IASPIS at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts, Stockholm, with scientific and educational chalkboard drawings. The project generated controversy, "...because it was made suddenly obvious how tightly the acceptance of an artistic work is still bound to the guaranteed authorship of an artistic personality."
  Honest Threads (2009) was a boutique installation in one of Toronto's most idiosyncratic mega-stores:  Honest Ed's Department Store, curated by Mona Filip of the Koffler Centre of the Arts. A lush, theatrically furnished show-room held row upon ro
caption: "On Loan" - Installation view
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