Iris Haeussler (or German spelling Häussler; German pronunciation: [ˈiːʁɪs ˈhɔʏslɐ]; born 6 April 1962) is a conceptual and installation art artist of German origin. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Many of Iris Haeussler's works are detailed, hyperrealistic installations that visitors can decode as narrative stories. Recurring topics in her work include historic, cultural, social and geographic origins; family ties, relationships, memory, history, trauma and obsession.
Haeussler studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Heribert Sturm. The loosely structured curriculum emphasized studio work. There were few mandatory courses and emphasis was placed on exploration and experiment, practice and critical discussion. Haeussler's experiments were influenced by artistic positions of Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Joseph Beuys; she herself names Medardo Rosso as her most important inspiration.
Recognition received include a scholarship of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Karl-Hofer Prize of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts and a Kunstfonds Fellowship. In 1999 Haeussler had a guest professorship at the Munich Academy. She has shown widely throughout Europe in the nineties before moving to Toronto, Canada in 2001.
While Haeussler was trained as a conceptual artist and sculptor, her work is not easily classified by method or genre: she has had solo-shows of sketches, drawings and sculpture as well as participatory, interactive pieces. However her most notable works are large, immersive installations. Philosopher Mark Kingwell notes: "It is an example of what we might label haptic conceptual art: the art of ideas that functions by way of immersion, even ravishment."
Major immersive off-site and museum installations
With her hyper-real installations, she presents the living situations of fictitious protagonists who have arranged their lives somewhere between obsession and art."Synthetic Memories" is a tag Haeussler applies to her major installations; she sees "synthetic" as opposed to "analytic" in the artistic process of creating memory from research, ideas and studio-work. Often years in the making, they derive much of their credibility from painstaking attention to site-specific detail and hyper-realist staging. They are also invariably off-site works.
Initially she adopted a strategy of erasing herself and the conventions of presenting her work as "art" by creating environments seemingly built up and then abandoned by obsessed individuals (so called outsiders). In more recent projects she includes the process of research and staging into the final presentations.
Ou Topos – Wien (1989), Her earliest apartment installation recreated the situation of an aged man in a turn-of-the-century social housing project "Ou Topos" in Vienna, Austria. Austria. Focus of the installation was the bedroom that had been filled with thousands of tin cans of preserves, stacked on crude, wooden shelves, each wrapped in thick lead-foil and labeled with their date of expiry. Visitors explored the space unsupervised on their own. "[The work] reveals the circumstances of others, without trespassing on their intimacy or dignity. In order to create an authentic representation, [Haeussler] has lived in this apartment for half a year. She immersed herself deeply into this unfamiliar space, absorbed the odors of the house, listened to its sounds and adapted her routines to those of the other inhabitants. When the apartment was opened to visitors, fiction and reality appeared superimposed".
Pro Polis (1993) was Haeussler's first hotel intervention, staged in a three-star hotel near the Cathedral in Milan, Italy. She covered the walls, floor, window and all amenities of a guest room with a thick layer of wax. Visitors obtained the key at the reception for an unsupervised experience of the space. With this work Haeussler "reverses the canon of sculpture, in the spirit of the revolutionary sculptor Medardo Rosso, [...as she ...] raises the question of overcoming its intrinsic limitations".
Huckepack (1995: Piggyback) was a hotel intervention in which Haeussler installed the personal belongings of a traveling woman into a room of a downtown hotel in Leipzig, Germany. Guests were offered an upgrade into this room, if they agreed to share their space with this fictitious person. They were confronted with one of the beds being unmade and a silk-pajama left on site, one of the towels having been used, an open suitcase with personal items on the dresser, all conspiring to create a virtual, yet tangible physical presence.
Monopati (2000), featured two apartments in two separate cities – Munich and Berlin, Germany. These were transformed into different narratives, but remained connected through a single school class photograph, taken in the late 1930s that could be seen in both apartments. Visitors were able to obtain the key to the apartments at nearby galleries (Galerie Huber-Goueffon in Munich, Wohnmaschine in Berlin) and proceeded on their own into the installation.
The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach (2006) was Iris Haeussler's first major work in North America and her largest and most complex installation at that time. Curated by Rhonda Corvese and reviewed internationally, this multilayered installation in an entire house in downtown Toronto "The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach" – Toronto recounts the life of an aged, reclusive artist, through the mediation of an on-site archivist (often Haeussler herself). Initially, the project was not publicized as an artwork but presented as an assessment by the fictitious "Municipal Archives". Haeussler intended to facilitate an unfiltered and unhindered experience of discovery. The subsequent disclosure sparked controversy on the ethics of engaging uninformed visitors in an often emotional encounter with a fictional narrative that is initially presented as fact. Canada's National Post ran the frontpage headline "Reclusive downtown artist a hoax" which prompted Mark Kingwell to deconstruct this "miniature narrative of outrage" and to clarify that the transformation from fact to fiction in the visitor's experience was indeed central to the work. Novelist Martha Baillie visited the assessment, trusting in the veracity of the presentation. She published an essay on her experience, noting that: "She'd had no right to lie to me", feeling anger and loss, yet finally conceding: "The Joseph Wagenbach I'd created in my mind, [...] nobody could take from me, not even Iris Häussler. He was mine".
The Joseph Wagenbach Foundation Foundation Website marks Häussler's long-term project, resuming from her 2006 installation and expanding Wagenbach's legacy into a fictitious foundation. Launched officially at the Villa Toronto in January 2015, it offers small edition bronzes of a number of his sculptures and a drawing edition to the public. While the foundation works on digitizing his drawing and sculpture archive, and planning on the dissemination of his work and life, Häussler states: "the Joseph Wagenbach Foundation is a fictitious foundation of a fictitious artist, but his works are real."
He Named Her Amber (2008–2010) was an installation in The Grange, Toronto, curated by David Moos and commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario. Häussler created Amber, a 19th century Irish immigrant scullery maid, who for many years secretly led a passionate and enigmatic life. A fictitious company called Anthropological Services Ontario (also created by Häussler) conducted excavations at the historic museum site. Guided tours allowed viewing of the recent discovery of Ambers' personal artifacts which she embedded in beeswax and hid underneath floorboards in the mansion. In 2012, the Art Gallery of Ontario published a book documenting the project, including the controversial visitors responses that ensued about an art work that was initially presented as an historical excavation.
He Dreamed Overtime: All Our Relations, 18th Biennale of Sydney. Curated by Catherine De Zegher and Gerald McMaster. Häussler developed the story of a former park ranger who mourned a lost love. In this process he created strange organic looking beeswax objects that resembled corals. The narrative then tells of an investigation by a pest-control company. Ultimately, the company's manager himself becomes so deeply fascinated by the case that he re-enacts parts of the missing ranger's work, combined it with his own interpretations and created a vibrant blog on his company's web-site, illustrating his own psychological reconstruction of a world of human desire, sensuality and loss.