Bart Hess

On Monday, 16th of August 2010, BART HESS arrived at the Gastgastgeber Hotel in Oberhausen. He is one of the artists presenting a piece of work in "Kammer 5" (in English: chamber 5) of the hotel. His artistic practice generally revolves around different surfaces and materials such as textiles. The new approach he discovered here consists of tracing the repetitive use of the same materials by several people.

One of the main characteristics of a hotel is the fact that a lot of people use the same items in the same fashion: they sit upright or lie flatly on a bed, they put their head on a pillow, cover themselves with a blanket and so forth. The same items are used over and over again, by a succession of hotel customers. Of course you get always new blankets and stuff, but the idea still exists!

So Bart started collecting his own traces he left whilst staying in one of the hotel rooms.Let us take the pillow as an example: He used a foil one side of which was coated with a sticky film. So when Bart went to sleep he positioned the foil inbetween his face and the pillow, the sticky side for his cheek, the non-sticky side on the pillow's fabric. By doing so, he could trace the texture of his face in its dormant state on the pillow. Bart also tried the same method with his entire body. Here are some images of the results, and to see the actual artifacts for yourself, please come and visit "chamber 5" in the GastGastgeber Hotel.