Between life and death
In Birth to Death List Matt Mullican evokes the imaginary life of a fictional woman. The text, written by the artist, describes a succession of moments and experiences. Some are important and defining, while others are mundane and insignificant, but they still leave a lasting impression.
The events that took place in an actual human life are recounted in Janice Tanaka's Memories from the Department of Amnesia. Tanaka explores the mourning that surrounded the loss of her mother and the role of memories therein.
An end also means a new beginning. Kimio Tsuchiya's Remembrance visualises the possibility of rebirth. From a cyclical view of the world, he regards creation and destruction as connected. The charred wood and burnt matches underscore the finite nature of the material, but at the same time ash is a fertile substance that nourishes life. Christiaan Bastiaans' haunting Spirit Child also lies at the intersection between life and death.
The passage of time
With Future Sarcophagus Candice Lin looks beyond her own mortality. She created a terracotta sarcophagus intended for her future dead body. Stephen Kaltenbach also relates to the inevitable passage of time. The contents of his Time Capsules are unknown. They are inscribed with a time, determined by Kaltenbach, when they may be opened. These are not concrete dates, but possible as well as inescapable events, such as his own death.
Reunited tomb figurines
Between Worlds also includes a reconstruction of Huang Yong Ping's 1994 installation The Overturned Tomb. In this work, he symbolically reunites Chinese tomb figurines from the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD), which are part of Helene Kröller-Müller's collection, with the empty tomb in which they originally belonged.