The thinking person's hall of mirrors: Leandro Erlich's Changing Rooms is still set up in the gardens of Manarat Al Saadiyat until late February, and merits a good wander.
Here's a bit of background on the reality-bending Argentine.
Erlich is a master of taking fundamentally banal spaces and scenes from day-to-day life, making them the centre of her art and then injecting a dreamlike, subversive sense for the surreal.
Check out her site
Her installation work in Manarat Al Saadiyat is
, a development on a 2008 work first exhibited at Galleria Continua in Italy, recreates the sort of fitting room one could find in any big department store. Taking this corridor lined with mirrored booths as the basis for the piece, Erlich has transformed walking through this space into an exploratory journey, we grope at walls to make sure they're there, we become stuck only to find we have to step through a 'mirror' to continue through the piece. Well worth getting lost in.
Great early pieces by Erlich worth looking at is Swimming Pool from 1999, in which she placed trickling water through a sheet of glass over the top of an empty swimming pool in which to create the illusion of water within. The piece speaks for itself, watch this great video by Vernissage TV here:
Erlich had a great piece at
in New York last year as well, Stuck Elevator, in which she installed a fake lift shaft in the gallery space and had it caught between floors. As viewers gazed into the little chamber, some sense of mystery was created - a fake yet familiar, a banal yet made somehow secretive by being beyond there reach.
Make sure to take advantage of this rare appearance in the UAE. How to get there is
.
