93 x 93 cm is approximately half a king size bed or alternatively four sidewalk paving slabs in Brazil’s Porto Alegre. Eight of these often figure as the hard surface of a sleeping pad for a homeless person. This is the size of the floor installation Imagine there is no Rhino. A good 500 years ago, the first rhinoceros to reach Europe drowned in the Mediterranean on its way from Portugal to Pope Leo X. In the absence of the real animal, multiple prints of the rhinoceros imagined by Albrecht Dürer have in contrast survived in European archives and deeply shaped the popular image of the animal. The title refers on the one hand to John Lennon’s anti-war song, Imagine (1971), but also to the fact that Dürer had never seen a rhino.
Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square is probably a reference to an all-black satirical work of 1897 – in point of fact, a bad racist joke – by French writer and humourist Alphonse Allais called Negroes Fighting in a Tunnel by Night. This is also about Imagine as a concept. An explanation proposed by media theorist Boris Groys is that Malevich was referring to Plato’s analogy of the cave: if we are only able to perceive a dull reflection of the world, rather than painting yet another poor imitation, is it not better to paint the pure abstraction right from the start?