Winter 2006 Bernd Behr: House Without a Door > Project Information

Bernd Behr: House Without a Door

7 November - 17 December 2006

Chisenhale Gallery is pleased to present the new large-scale single screen work by Bernd Behr in his first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery.

House Without a Door explores the relationship between film and architecture, linking a US military test structure with studio props of 1920s German expressionist film.  

In 1943 the US military commissioned émigré architect Erich Mendelsohn and Hollywood studio RKO to design and build a replica Berlin housing estate in the Utah desert to test incendiary bombs eventually deployed in the bombing of Dresden and Berlin. Just as the early expressionist film House Without a Door (1914) – which lends its title to this work – has no surviving print and exists therefore as a speculative entity, so the interior of this building is fictionalised through a set of references to 1920s German expressionist films, including Faust (F.W. Murnau, 1926) and Dr. Mabuse (F. Lang, 1922), reflecting Mendelsohn’s own relation to Weimar filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and the astonishing proximity of the test site to an actual village in Utah called ‘Faust’.

The constructed spaces in Behr’s film conflate the spaces of military test structures, film sets and architectural models, exploring multiple temporal and geographical narratives as they emerge between its static documentary location shots and abstract constructed scenarios.

The film will be accompanied by a specially commissioned soundtrack. A three-page feature in the autumn issue of Vertigo magazine will function as a parallel space for the work, exploring the web of associations underpinning this project.

The project developed from a residency Behr held at The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Utah, in 2005, and is supported through a 2006 Artist’s Film and Video Award (Film London) and University of Gloucestershire.