Slipping Back Into The Darkness Novenber 11. - December 16. 2006 Tanja Rau and Lone Bank   Lone Bank and Tanja Rau, artists who understand the exhibition space as a stage, a sorcerer's chamber, dislocate the neutral project room. Deployed in the darkness of the first showroom, we encounter different episodes in the lives of two ambitious women. Hanging from the ceiling, printed polyester objects suggest a colorful comic strip that one can enter and which integrates the visitor into its storyline. With their installation, the Danish artist-duo Bank and Rau question moments of success. The piece not only brings dark margins into focus, but also bright epicenters. Toward an adequate form for their conception, the artists have developed the theatrical composition of the showroom, which also integrates lighting. With their dramatic exhibition practice, the public is offered a visual spectacle, and the idea of self-determined identity is put into question. The (re-)constitutive and active self is itself always already a part of the world and its mediated images, and all its self-contained contradictions. Thus it is not the individual case that is of greatest interest to the artists, but rather the correspondences that are constituted by modifications and doublings. The main darkened showroom of Sparwasser HQ, with its floating objects and pictures, becomes a tale in which the visitor takes part. Along with this large installation (Slipping Back Into The Darkness), Lone Bank and Tanja Rau present "Parade" (2006) in the second room. This recently completed film is the result of a project by diverse Danish artists who walked the streets of Copenhagen with a variety of props. The performance recalls the "united urbanism" demanded by the situationists and their "dérive", an action demonstrating an act meant to reclaim territory. Exhibition spaces, like public places are often subordinated by a strict function. Bank and Rau, however, create potential spaces in which one creates one's own meanings, and thus determines the whole. In doing this, one experiences oneself as an active agent. We thus slip into the darkness with the artists, and try to catch a glimpse of the things dwelling within. Text: co-curator Petra Reichensperger   The project is sponsored by the Danish Arts Council's Committee for Visual Arts.