Sarah Douglas, The Art Newspaper, What's On, June, 2002, p.2

Olaf Breuning: Hello Darkness

Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art

Last spring, the Swiss Institute screened Olaf Breuning's video "trailer" for his current installation (until 3 August). Movies - in particular, B-grade gory horror flicks - as well as TV, print advertising and recent art history provide fodder for Breuning's installations, which invite the viewer into a funhouse atmosphere, embellished with cheap props, and brimming over with pop cultural references. Breuning's work has always managed to skirt irony; and it is slightly nightmarish because strangely earnest, approximating a latter-day, MTV-infused version of Paul McCarthy."Hello darkness" immerses the viewer in the filmic experience of following the trail of destruction: a library torn to tatters, of an "axe-wielding sex doll". Viewers pass through clouds of smoke and a disorienting light tunnel, before arriving at the culprit: a disarmingly human-looking "real doll" that Breuning purchased over the internet. Breuning's interest in kitsch and the grotesque, not to mention parodying artists such as Matthew Barney, is evident in an earlier work, "Sybille". Breuning, who trained as a photographer, has shown internationally since the mid-1990s. His last major installation, which opened last June at the Kunstverein Freiburg and travelled last autumn to Metro Pictures Gallery in New York, was a walk-in diorama involving mechanical apes with electrical green eyes that flashed out of the darkness at visitors entering the room.