As in her earlier works de Beer's use of the pastiche technique is present also in her last video installation, presented at Arndt & Partner Berlin (2007), which is the story of the Bauhaus told against the grain. In the official chapters of art history the Bauhaus stands for all things modern, that is, a construct of a future of promises based on rational thoughts. But the Bauhaus, like much of abstract art is also rooted in occult perceptions and its obsession with the idea of progress was often translated through many of its mentors, such as Johannes Itten or Vassily Kandinsky, into a language which was more esoteric than scientific. These occultic tendencies stemming from theosophy as in the case of Kandinsky or the Zoroastian styled sect, the cult of Mazdaznan, whose adept was Itten, are given a visual space by de Beer which relates to the occult in its color scheme, its morbid atmosphere, and its physical contextualization (you are lead to the work through a forest), that is the mental landscape she used in earlier works, the mental space she feels at home with. And as in the earlier works, here also meaning is destabilized by overlaying the text, the Bauhaus Manifesto, rich in expectations and spoken in the authoritative voice of the one who knows against the images which mutate its meaning. The text echoes Oscar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet" about an alliance forged between man and machine that is now morphing into a break-dance sequence, thus keeping the promise but denying it the sense of original decorum it entailed. This discrepancy between the utopian and rational text and the occultic paraphernalia of light machines and unsolved presentation, this rebus between rationality and its mad daughters, is the heart of darkness towards which we are being lead. From this perspective the Bauhaus is a ghost town whose inhabitants visit us in our dreams, a place you entered through the woods and by mistake. A place of broken promises.
