Changing Rooms

Practically at the end of the exhibition, the installation Changing Rooms, by Leandro Erlich, introduces us through a small door into a clothes fitting room. In the front and left side mirror we see, as we would expect in front of any reflective surface, the fitting room and our entire body. In the right side mirror, however, we see the fitting room, but not our body. It is then that we discover that we are in a complex labyrinth, that we can cross some of the mirrors to move from one fitting room to another, and we are seized by a feeling of strangeness in front of mirrors that do not reflect what they should.

The installation introduces the fragmentation to which the subject is involved in the dynamics that "The Assault of Illusion" has encouraged us to feel throughout our journey: our reality, our desire and our subjectivity have been genealogically built on an illusion, and this illusion requires specific techniques, inventions and innovations that, at least at the beginning, had to be built and held by those who had the resources to do so. Our configuration of our identity, therefore, has been inherently subject to power biases, and continues to be so today, perhaps more than ever, due to the weight that advanced – and costly – technologies have on it. Realising this necessarily entails a strong fragmentation of subjectivity that defines to some extent the world we inhabit today, in which, despite being more aware than ever of the mechanisms and the certainty that the subject is neither solid nor stable, we are reluctant to leave the space of illusion, embracing the comfort of deception.

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich lives and works between Paris, Buenos Aires and Montevideo. He was born in Argentina in 1973. Over the last two decades, his work has been exhibited internationally and is part of permanent collections in prestigious museums and private collections, including the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Tate Modern in London, the Musée national d'art moderne–Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa (Japan). As a conceptual artist, his work questions the basis of our perception of reality and explores art's capacity to generate questions from a visual perspective. His work seeks to reduce the distance between the museum or gallery space and everyday experiences, inviting the viewer to be an active participant in the construction of meaning.

www.leandroerlich.art