Installation art is a work that uses an entire space, often a whole room, and is made of various materials, objects, light, sound or video. Unlike a sculpture, which you look at from the outside, an installation is something you usually walk into and become part of. Ilya Kabakov even maintained that the main actor in his so-called total installation is the viewer. Many installations are made as site-specific works (created directly for a particular place), while others can be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere.
A precursor was the Merzbau, the space Kurt Schwitters gradually rebuilt inside his own house in Hanover. From the late 1950s Allan Kaprow made what he called environments, and from the 1960s installation became one of the main languages of contemporary art. It builds on the idea, shared with the ready-made and conceptual art, that a work need be neither painted nor carved. Today it is at home at biennales and major museums: in 2003 to 2004 Olafur Eliasson filled the Turbine Hall of London’s Tate Modern with an artificial sun in The Weather Project.
Internationally, the icons include Tracey Emin’s My Bed of 1998, an unmade bed with everything that goes with it, and Yayoi Kusama’s mirror rooms. The Czech connection leads all the way to Venice. In 2024 Eva Koťátková filled the Czech and Slovak Pavilion with the installation The Heart of a Giraffe in Captivity is Twelve Kilos Lighter, about Lenka, a giraffe captured in Kenya in 1954 for Prague Zoo. Visitors passed through a tunnel shaped like an enlarged giraffe’s neck. Krištof Kintera is another Czech artist working with objects and installations.
Installations can be collected, but they are bought mainly by institutions and by collectors with a great deal of space. Ask about dimensions, storage, maintenance of any technology and who is allowed to rebuild the work. A certificate with installation instructions is often key. With Félix González-Torres’s famous candy spills, it is precisely the certificate that makes the work a work, and on resale it is issued anew in the name of the new owner. Without documentation an installation can easily become just a pile of things. Still tempted? Installation can even be the medium around which you build the concept of an entire collection.
— Anna Pulkertová, founder of Art Part Club
Related terms: Conceptual art · Performance · Video art and new media · Venice Biennale · Collection concept
