Via Lewandowsky & Durs Grünbein

The installation "Vanity of Vanities" stages the experience of waiting in a reception room for a bureaucratic organization to do something. The recreated waiting room is equipped with a large number of speakers broadcasting a text collage from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

"Waiting inside the modern architectures of bureaucracies and transit systems is a deferment of life, a waiting bereft of development and a reason for the modern human being's increasingly negative experience of time" (Durs Grünbein in the catalogue for the exhibition "How German is it? 30 Artists' Notion of Home")

Via Lewandowsky was born in 1963 in Dresden, where he now lives and works. The artist's website can be viewed at www.vialewandowsky.de

Durs Grünbein (German poet, essayist and translator) was born in Dresden in 1962 and now lives in Berlin.

Lewandowsky and Grünbein have worked on collective projects such as exhibitions, performances and books since the 1980s.