Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

She works primarily with space as medium, creating what she describes as architectural mise-en-scènes: colour-coded environments that viewers navigate like detectives entering someone else's biography. Her references are literary and cinematic rather than art-historical. The 1993 installation A Rebours, shown at Kunstverein Hamburg, took its title and logic from Huysmans's 1884 novel, building three rooms (yellow bedroom, red hall, blue office) that invited audiences into a character's interior world. Fritz Lang's 1948 film Secret Beyond the Door, about an architect who collects rooms where murders were committed, gave her a theoretical grounding for the claim that "rooms produce scenarios."

Her contribution to Documenta in Kassel in 2002, Park: A Plan for Escape, assembled displaced park objects from across the world in the Karlsaue gardens: volcanic lava from Mexico, a Copacabana telephone booth, a rose bush from Chandigarh. A pavilion showed a film montage drawing on Antonioni, Rossellini, and Tsai Ming-Liang. The work folded cinema, geography, and displacement into a single outdoor installation that was less a garden than a theory of one.

Gonzalez-Foerster has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (Aperto '93), the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Manifesta II in Luxembourg, and Documenta. She has described her installations as functioning like biographies of real and fictional people, citing Lou Andreas-Salomé and Marie Curie as early inspirations alongside fictional characters and film protagonists.