Wooden shelves, approx. 20,000 VHS tapes, neon tubes i.a. (immersive sculpture)
Thanks to the Creative Industries Fund NL
Courtesy: Joep van Liefland & Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden

The outer wall of the massive sculpture Video Palace #44 – The Hidden Universe is made up of shelves filled with VHS tapes—dead media in black plastic with handwritten, stick-on labels. The sculpture is a media-archaeological monument highlighting the rapid obsolescence of storage media, which evokes the theme of ever elusive – thirty years of transmediale. Joep van Liefland began his ongoing Video Palace series in 2002. The sculptures were originally conceived as cheap-looking, fully operational video rental stores, a function that has been lost over the years. They now serve as resonance rooms for obsolete media. Behind a glass door covered with stickers advertising technical equipment, lays the hidden universe of Video Palace #44. The diffusely lit room creates the atmosphere of a dark bachelor machine and a memorial to VHS video culture of the 1980s.