Iris Häussler’s narrative installations, which range from the sweeping to the succinct, revolve around fictitious histories. Each project begins with a detailed biography of an invented character, which Häussler drafts with a novelist’s eye for detail. She then builds objects or environments that her characters might have used or made, and opens them to the public. Her best-known projects, The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006) and He Named Her Amber (2008–9), were elaborately theatrical, often unsettling environments in which viewers were guided through displays of sculpture purportedly created by characters named Joseph Wagenbach and Mary O’Shea.
Since Häussler is interested in the distinctions between fiction and reality, she does not immediately reveal to viewers that her installations are artworks. On the contrary, she goes to great lengths to ensure that they first experience her historical fictions as truth (later, through various means, she reveals their actual status). Although she is sometimes criticized by people who feel that they have been duped, Häussler remains committed to a gradual unfolding of her works that begins with “naïve, childlike fascination” and ends with a reconsideration of the work in its new context.1 The entire process raises issues of authorship, artistic intention, and the constantly shifting boundaries between art and life.
Häussler’s latest project concerns a character she calls Ellen Stanley, who was stricken by an unidentified mental illness shortly after giving birth to a daughter in 1923. Stanley spent two years in an insane asylum before returning home and settling into a seemingly pointless but soothing routine: she filled her bathtub with clay, then dug holes in the soft material with her hands and filled the cavities with molten beeswax. Once hardened, the objects were excavated and displayed in her room. In order to maintain a continuous supply of wax, her family periodically removed and melted down the sculptures. At the time of Stanley’s death in 1931, only five of her works remained. These, along with a conical wax sculpture that inspired her, make up the work Ellen’s Gift (2011–12).2
In addition to the themes raised by Häussler’s earlier projects, Ellen’s Gift delves into the cultural issues embedded within women’s histories. Stanley’s mental illness (or “hysteria”) is linked to childbirth, which is in turn linked to her domestic art-making practice. “My fictitious characters use art as a private method to cope with their condition,” Häussler has written.3 Ellen’s method—filling a void and then extracting its contents—symbolically reenacts the processes of conception and birth.4 The equation between art making and childbearing raises additional questions: What is the exact nature of Ellen’s gift? For whom is it intended? In conflating her life with that of her invented (female) character, Häussler performs a doubling that further erases boundaries between history, fiction, reality, biography, and art.

As individuals get close in proximity they will start to activate one of the fiver personal spaces. These include public, social, personal, private, and intimidate. Once activated the space will appear defined by color and a sound. Creating an aleatoric or chance based soundscape that puts emphasis on the intrusion of these spaces.

These performances look at the relationship between the virtual and the real, questioning the actuality of the distance separating these two worlds.

“Reverberation” is an installation that takes place in an abandoned home. Based on the Working Memory model, it consists of three parts: Sensory Memory, Auditory memory and Visual Memory. On the ground level of the house a live Video feed is passed into small television set, where the viewer can see and experience a mediated version of the current moment in time: the “now”. From there the signal is delayed by a minute and is split into two parts, Auditory and visual and is dispersed into separate and segregated parts of the upper level of the house. Through multiple devices (such as a telephone, a radio and televisions) placed throughout the second floor the viewers have a chance to reengage in the experience previously had downstairs.

There is a threshold where these events/experiences no matter how vivid, become abstract and you become more apathetic towards your own history. “Reverberation” confronts this threshold.

Design by Emily Reile. Development and some design by me.