One could refer to Knut Henrik Henriksen’s sculptural interventions as constructed “architectural doubts.” He installed one such doubt, for example, in the exhibition Berlin North at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Between the entrance area and the former station hall, he inserted a massive wooden wall. From one side, it was reminiscent of the smooth wooden facade of a typical Scandinavian house, but from the other side it echoed the ornamental style of the original station architecture.

In the former post office, Henriksen is now showing the four-part work Mick Crib, Aston Coin and Davies Compound meet Mr. Z as a tableau, which is both sculpture and stage set. It forms the backdrop for an imaginary encounter between the absurd play The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, which premiered in 1960, and the works Crib, Coin, and Compound, which Carl Andre exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in 1965. Those pieces were made of polystyrene, and Henriksen refers to them directly here by hanging a massive, five-meter-long column made of Andre’s historical material below the roof of the exhibition space. Slightly oblique, it breaks through the strict, modernist lines of the architecture. A second column of identical dimensions stands on the floor nearby, its top covered in a foil in which the daylight and the sky are reflected. It thus appears to visually dissolve the object’s materiality.

In this manner, Henriksen’s installation comments on, but also counters the architectural situation found in the exhibition space. Conflated with the references to an absurd play, the action of which takes place mainly in a cluttered interior space, Henriksen’s sculptures become a stage set. They compromise their own autonomy and trigger a dramatic yet mirthful charade revolving around the ambiguous relations between the artist, the artwork, and the art system.

Knut Henrik Henriksen was born in 1970 in Oslo and studied in Bergen, Oslo and at the Frankfurt Städelschule. He lives and works in Berlin.