2010
As part of the 2010 Opera Festival at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, Philine Rinnert proposed an installation for the foyer of the opera house. The intervention involved architecture and furnishing of the foyer space. Some of the old oil portraits of deceased singers, conductors and directors, which had adorned the halls of the foyer for years, were removed. They were then hung closely next to one another in a metal cube built around the great Murano chandelier in front of the royal box. The alterations to the space, the emptied wall surfaces in the corridors and the unique atmosphere in the crowded cube in gave new force to the perception of the paintings. Re-hanging them in the cube’s interior recalled an iconostasis in an Orthodox church, or a castle’s ancestral portrait gallery. Some of the paintings seemed to stare back at the viewers, or to be communicating amongst themselves. It was about seeing and being seen.
