Contemplating art can be enjoyable, make us angry or happy, provoke, evoke memories in us, emotions, educate us and prompt us to ask questions. To what extent do we engage with a painting, a sculpture or an installation?

Installations assign the viewer an active role in the development of the artistic process. The work and the audience are no longer separated and the audience becomes an elementary part of the piece of art.

Artists enable us to encounter important experiences with our sensory and cognitive perception. Once we engage with a mise-en-scene room, we are at the mercy of a process, which we ourselves started, and only us give significance to. The creation of an installation explicitly includes the viewer and is designed for interaction.

Speaking about Aura Rendon Bengers installations, it is not only the viewer but often also herself who actively participates in the perceptual process. An interaction emerges and with it uncertainty; about how to deal with closeness, distance and the contact with the unknown.

Her work touches us. We get involved, take our time, look into our soul and to our vis-à-vis, ask ourselves to what extent we are prepared to engage in a face-to-face encounter. The artist plays with our curiosity, provokes, allows us to make a wide range of experiences whilst revealing a lot about her own personality; she looks after the “brave”, those who have engaged, and in a witty manner allows them to contact their infantile joy of discovery.

A text by Petra Erler-Striebel
Artist and Art mediator at Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlruhe