FROM THE OUTSIDE, IT WOULD SEEM THAT Minne Kersten has built a shonky flat-pack shed out of cheap wood, with a single window and door [1]. The curtains are drawn but there is a chink, and through it glows a soft light. This door is meant to be pushed. The Dutch multimedia artist’s new installation at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht is called The Same Room. It is a profoundly disturbing piece of work.
Inside her life-size model of a cramped bedroom is something like a deserted crime scene, furnished with an unmade, squalid mattress-bed and MDF shelving. Evidence of a chaotic life is strewn everywhere: books, ashtrays, clothes, papers, dampened and sickeningly grimy. The scene is mute, but we are invited to walk around, handle the detritus and fill the
