Rooms Without Walls

Childhood is often imagined as a protected space, set apart from the rest of the world. Yet that boundary is far more fragile than it appears. The works brought together here explore the moments when those boundaries begin to dissolve: when roles become unstable, certainties fall away, or reality asserts itself with unexpected force. Beyond every wall lies not so much another world as another way of becoming.

For Gillian Wearing, the mask is not a device for concealment but a condition for honesty. In Confess All On Video, strangers find it easier to reveal themselves once they are no longer recognizable. By contrast, Self-Portrait at Three Years Old suggests that childhood can never be recovered as an untouched memory. By reconstructing her own childhood portrait, Wearing reminds us that personal history is shaped as much by reinvention as by recollection.

This understanding of identity as something performed and constructed also runs through Cindy Sherman’s 1994 campaign for Comme des Garçons. Far removed from conventional fashion photography, Sherman creates uncanny, sometimes unsettling characters that resist familiar categories. Working with Rei Kawakubo, she turns the language of advertising into a reflection on the roles we begin learning in childhood and continue to inhabit, often without questioning them. Not all boundaries, however, exist on the level of representation.

In Thomas Dworzak’s photograph, taken in a psychiatric hospital sheltering Chechen refugees, childhood is confronted with a reality that leaves no time to grow up. The hospital walls offer both refuge and confinement; the boundaries imposed by war have already been crossed. Here, the passage into adulthood is no longer a gradual process of becoming, but a sudden rupture.

Rather than celebrating the act of crossing boundaries as an achievement, this selection invites us to consider what happens when those boundaries stop feeling fixed, when they become visible precisely because they begin to give way.