The hotel: a place where travellers and/or lovers rendezvous or rest; a visit possibly forgotten in its transience or remembered by its intensity. The title suggests a connection with the USA by its namesake in New York. So, while sleeping in Germany, the visitor may dream away continents and escape to cold-war-distant America. 

1995, the year in which the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps is remembered in Europe. ‘Hotel Chelsea-Köln’ the video, filmed site-specifically, is an unlikely memorial. Some of the voice-over excerpts are concerned more directly with the theme of remembrance than others; texts are in English and German. One may question what the relationship the visual scenarios have with the various issues discussed in the heard texts. With little attempt at deconstruction, the pictures display rituals of courtship and sex. There is some play with gender representation but in the context of “art” video, these are hardly ground-breaking novelties; in fact the sex sequences deliver a sense of banality – more kitsch than art. This may be explained as a kind of post-war, wall, feminist, modern, malaise. However the connection propounded by the juxtapositions of text and image: the war of the sexes and war, interpersonal abuse and human abuses on a more general and historical level, is relevant, I believe, now as ever. Polarizing of concepts between text and image, text and text, create palpable tensions. The various related incidents, stories of hypocrisy and prejudice in human encounters, build in emotional volume until climax of a kind is achieved, a climax that is, however, an anti-climax in its spiritual vacuum. Behind the “true stories – true confessions” is a suggestion that “right” attitude is not as straight forwardly obvious or practised as the current dictate of political correctness demands. In the face of this interpretation of human weakness, the artist gives free licence to black humour.

Description source: publicity materials