Video installation, video projected on shop windows, 2,8 x1, 5m, 21:34 min (loop), 16:9, no sound, 2007
In the video installation “how to go through something you can’t see”, Roland Wegerer transforms the everyday encounter with a shop window into a powerful reflection on boundaries, visibility, and the unspoken rules of public space. Projected at a monumental scale directly onto shop windows, the piece features a larger-than-life face pressing, rubbing, and distorting itself against the glass. The absence of sound heightens the visual intensity, focusing all attention on the physical interaction between body and barrier.
Shop windows, as Wegerer highlights, serve as both display and defense. They are designed to be impeccably clean, untouchable, and increasingly protected by alarm systems—an almost invisible but impenetrable boundary separating the inside from the outside. In urban life, touching the glass is a social taboo, a forbidden act that threatens the pristine surface and the order it represents.
Wegerer’s face, magnified and distorted by pressure and friction, becomes a living sculpture—an example of his concept of expanded sculpture, where the boundaries between object, action, and media dissolve. The glass, usually a transparent medium for commerce and consumption, is transformed into a site of resistance. As the face presses harder, the features warp and smear, and the glass becomes marked with traces of body fat and saliva. These fleeting marks not only contaminate the surface but also challenge the notion of cleanliness and order that shop windows are meant to uphold.
“How to go through something you can’t see” is not just a visual spectacle but a philosophical inquiry: What are the boundaries we encounter every day—physical, social, psychological—that remain unseen yet profoundly shape our behavior? By confronting the viewer with the distorted, marked face on the glass, Wegerer makes the invisible visible and the untouchable tangible, embodying his creative drive and passion for innovation.
PROTECHT, CASS – Bank Space Gallery, London (UK)