Hans Schabus: Deserted Conquest

Renowned for disrupting and reconfiguring space in unexpected ways, Austrian artist Hans Schabus, born in 1970, produces site-specific installations that use spatial displacement to debunk cultural symbols. For his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Schabus made Deserted Conquest, a 15,000-square-foot installation commissioned by SITE Santa Fe, 2007. Taking the New Mexico landscape as his subject, he created a series of confrontations that dismantle our cultural romanticism of the desert landscape and idealizations of the West. This consisted of two new videos, sculptures, drawings and a variety of found objects, including a partially reconstructed mobile home and more than 100 tons of dirt. Viewers were encouraged to navigate the terrain freely, their tracks transforming the space over time. As a further conceit orchestrated by the artist, the catalogue’s full-color images are photographed along cardinal lines, lending the reader a fresh perspective on the original exhibit.