Wolfgang Thaler’s series “Mep ‘Yuk” is a collection of pictures showing interiors, entrance halls and waiting rooms, corridors of office buildings, hotels, cultural buildings and the like; found in Mexico City, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Sofia, Vienna and Wolfsburg. As different as their origins and cultural context may be, they are related in their function.
Slow movements through deserted corridors, offices and foyers lead deeper and deeper into the imaginary world of “Mep ‘Yuk”. Its headquarters could correspond to a gigantic building complex or an entire paradoxical city. The space is medial and imaginary. The absence of people allows concentration on the props and infrastructure of the headquarters.
The images work to transform manifest spaces back into the utopian from which they sprang as products of modernity. If the hope of modernity was to realise a utopia, “Mep ‘Yuk” remodernises reality by returning it to the utopian. In “Mep ‘Yuk”, time seems to stand still. The photographed reality becomes a still life, revealing itself as an imagination or as an intermediate space in time. The centre can be seen as a loop that seeks to convey the infinity of “Mep ‘Yuk”.