Gazing at the Glazing, 2021 - Viktor Petrov

The spatial installation Gazing at the Glazing from Viktor Petrov consists of 60 commercially available riot shields used by police authorities worldwide for crowd control. Cross-shaped stainless steel brackets and cables connect the individual shields to form a monumental façade fragment. Gazing at the Glazing criticises modern culture's excessive attention to the surface and its ignorance of the deeper political nature of architecture. The falling installation seems to have lost its common function as an architecture: stabilisation and protection. In the process of collapse, the boundary between interior and exterior, private and public space, which remains "inextricably bound" to architecture, is erased.