Introduction

Full of color and movement, Diana Thater's projection spaces captivate the eye. She lends the colors their independence by manipulating the projection devices, which they then reproduce incorrectly or distortedly. Foils on the windows of the rooms blur the inside and outside in floods of magenta, green and blue. The effect is as seductive as it is irritating, but the colors by no means subordinate themselves to the creation of illusions. For an artist living in Los Angeles, the repertoire of Hollywood cinema could be something like daily bread. Thater uses it to open a space between technical apparatus and the images they create. She expresses this imaginary space, the 'cinematic space', in architectural space.

Diana Thater, born in San Francisco in 1962, refers explicitly to early video art, meaning the first generation of conceptual video art that, like structuralist film, was concerned, among other things, with the disclosure of mechanisms of representation. Thus the visualization of the apparatus is an essential part of her work. 

– excerpt from Von Wölfen und Konstrukten by Julia Mummenhoff, Szene Hamburg 3/1997  P.70/71