As a teenager, dying of boredom in the classroom, I was fascinated by the ‘overhead projector’ that was still habitually used to enlarge exercises from printed sheets of transparent acetate onto a screen. This pedagogical apparatus, which my teachers fondly nicknamed the ‘OHP,’ had been invented in the late nineteenth century as a ‘viewgraph’ and was then adopted by the US military in the 1950s to train army recruits. A victim of obsolescence, by the early 2000s the OHP was getting phased out, as (post)modernisation brought flashy new digital projectors to the newer wings of my school. As I was perennially on the hunt for classroom distractions (a visible hickey on a teacher’s neck; an audible dressing-down in a nearby classroom; the sound of a lawnmower shearing the school field; a handwritten note being passed from someone to their crush), the OHP and the wobbly images it knocked back off the mirror above its focusing lens were replete with all sorts of strange affordances and ghostly auras: the loop between what Alfred Gell called ‘the enchantment of technology and the technology of enchantment’ (1). The classroom would be plunged into darkness, then a soft penumbra of tungsten light would bleed in a milky fringe around the exercises being projected, as the mirror image itself would quiver tremulously in and out of focus, like when you first wake up and your eyes take a minute to adjust. Sometimes a teacher’s stray hair would even fall onto the flatbed of the projector, or in a moment of absentmindedness they’d forget to invert or adequately focus the image, and I’d relish these anamorphic squiggles looming noirishly across the walls.
The Oslo-based artist Doris Guo has worked with the spectral potential of ‘projection’ for the last few years. A projection (whether from an acetate sheet to a classroom wall or, as in the projective theater of memory, from the past into the present) prospects itself along the faultline between presence and absence, hereness and thereness—dislocating whatever it enlarges or enhances. For her exhibition XO at Derosia in 2019, Guo bisected chairs typical of Chinese restaurants in New York and installed them in crevices within the walls, or into tightly-fitting hand-painted boxy frames. Hung low on the wall, these pieces opened up an inquiry into dislocated people and things comporting themselves, fitting in, trying to become unobtrusive. Extending this investigation of dislocation into a more personal register, in Guo’s two-part exhibition series begun at the project-space Veronica in Seattle (2022) and continued via Back at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (2024), she presented a series of diptychs. Paintings and drawings that her mother Waeili Wang produced in Shanghai before emigrating to the United States were hung contrapuntally alongside a series of anamorphic pinhole photographs Guo took while sorting through her mother’s archive.
In Hong Kong Guo also presented the first of her projection installations, beginning a series which now constitutes the majority of her first institutional survey in Germany, at the Kunstverein Braunschweig. The projection works in Bent at the Window assemble fragmentary domestic objects and scraps (a bungee cord, a plastic cap, postcards, a painted offcut of MDF, some sheaves of cellophane packaging tied together with elastic bands) into enigmatic still lives that shimmer on the gallery walls. The devices she uses for these are opaque projectors, or episcopes—an older, close relative of the OHP, albeit with a brighter halogen bulb—whose purpose has largely been to assist artists and draughtspersons with tracing complex motifs. Guo encases each of her projectors in bespoke carapace that lie somewhere between dioramas and forms of personal encryption. The show opens with Shed, where the projector is contained within a birdhouse structure, while the three subsequent works are then encased in two further architectural dioramas (mimicking the sorts of generic plaster friezes and fencing that could be found anywhere throughout northern Europe) meanwhile, in Growing, Piling, the projection emits from a discarded laundry pile.
Here the sometimes grand art historical allusions of the projected images—which are most pronounced between the bound sheaves of plastic in Shed and the Chiaroscuro of a Flemish still life like Adriaen Coorte’s Still Life with Asparagus and Red Currants (1696)—are counterpoised by the concealment of the projector within these elaborate structures, and the manner in which this concealment only serves to further separate the viewer from the objects being projected. In Growing, Piling for instance, the items projected include a discarded bottle top, and what appeared to be the screwback bolts for an earring, while other pieces feature novelty egg-cups and a generic postcard of a desert alongside what resembles a scrunched-up christmas cracker toy. These quotidian assemblages, prepared on-site by the artist, undergo a kind of hierophanic transmutation through the beam of the episcope and the anti-spectacular spectacle of the exhibition’s display. When installed together, their insularity (which draws attention to what is concealed as much as what they reveal) allows Guo’s projection works to form fitting visual analogues for the bricolage of remembrance as an activity, while also resonating with the intergenerational experience of dislocation her earlier work addressed. As Barbara Maria Stafford reminds us in her study Devices of Wonder, ‘‘‘To project” once meant to work an alchemical transmutation by casting the philosopher’s stone over base metal in the hope of turning an inferior amalgam into pure gold.’ (2) The works in Bent at the Window pursue a similarly alchemical process, yet one whose valorising activity seems far harder to assess. Though there may indeed be, as William Carlos Williams declared in ‘Paterson’, no ideas but in things—the ideas such things contain can often remain obscure to us, leaving us to deal only with the fog of their projections.
(1) Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds.), Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 40–63.
(2) Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Revealing Technologies/Magical Domains’, in Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak (eds.), Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: The Getty Research institute, 2001), p. 83.
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“Bent at the Window”, curated by Junia Thiede.
The artistic practice of DORIS GUO (*1992 in San Francisco, lives and works in Oslo) is based on capturing moods and precise observations, which she condenses into multifaceted works and atmospheres.
George MacBeth is a writer and editor based in Berlin. His criticism has appeared in Art Monthly, e-flux, and Asymptote Journal, amongst other outlets. He is currently working on his first collection of fiction.
