Suspension
Burkhard Beschow

Exhibition Text

Burkhard Beschow’s video installation provides a viewpoint into the hidden interiors of abandoned buildings associated with the German railway network. Empty and decommissioned, these buildings are vacant properties where access is blocked to the public, and their operations have been disconnected from the grid. Still, somehow, they remain part of the transport network infrastructure—at night illuminated by railway lighting, only lightly restricted by fences or security.

In a state of disrepair, the abandoned buildings are often barricaded with heavy-duty steel sheets, perforated and reminiscent of the inner cities of East Germany during the 1990s and early 2000s. Not coincidentally, this was when Deutsche Bahn began commonly using perforated panels to conceal old buildings. For wanderers, urban explorers, and others seeking the dilapidated, the chances of encountering perforated panels today are highest at abandoned train stations and similar buildings along the German rail network. These are the sites that Beschow repeatedly visits to make his videos.

More than a portrait or document of an old structure, his video installation—composed of thousands of photographs of the insides of buildings—is an ongoing process that poses questions. Probing deeper than other explorers, his exploration goes beyond urbex clichés such as What’s inside? What remains? Look how old it all is! More than this, Beschow’s interest lies somewhere along the lines of Are these the remnants of another world we are looking into?

Beschow’s photographic process, in which a camera lens peeps from one world into another, hints at the 21st-century concept of the Backrooms. Quoting Wikipedia, the Backrooms are a fictional, impossibly large, extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality—actual or digital. The concept was born out of internet culture. We are reminded of a scene in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo exits the Matrix through a door and enters a dead-silent corridor that stretches endlessly. Revealed to him is the infrastructure of the designed world he has been living in. The infinite corridor is full of doors, and each door is an exit into another possibility within this fake world. No-clipping, it is called. You might remember a similar glitch in the Grand Theft Auto video game series when our unlawful character unexpectedly exits the settings of the game and endlessly falls through digital space. In all cases, the protagonist enters a liminal space usually kept hidden from them.

Beschow’s video installation is constructed from photographs taken with a small digital camera; the size of the lens conveniently fits the perforations in the sheets guarding the buildings. We see the occasional shadow or reflection of the photographer, but apart from that, no human figures are visible. The buildings are empty and ghostly. It resonates with the writings of the late Mark Fisher, for whom the eerie is a sense of absence—where something should be there but isn’t. Absence is something we witness in Beschow’s video installation, along with a feeling of the past and its synchronic fantasy about a different, foreclosed future. But unlike the sadness and desolation referred to in some of Fisher’s writings, Beschow’s video installation lacks the persuasive affect found in music or cinema. The video installation itself is silent; however, across the room, a superannuated transmitter emits sound. An audio effect suggesting progression echoes in the space, derived from recordings of Beschow’s footsteps walking through abandoned railway buildings. Also heard, concealed within a pair of headphones, is a probable voice-over that reads a timeline of the loss and sale of abandoned railway stations and the transition of listed buildings from public to private ownership.

Are we to take away that a lost past or an unrealised future is what Beschow is getting at? The installation is not immediately melancholic or forlorn; however, it does provide a space to reflect, without urgency, on our unsettled present.

John Ryaner

Press
Emergent Magazine