The exhibition HONIGFALLE by the artist Signe Raunkjaer divides the Molkerei Werkstatt into three zones. In the front section of the space, the film Die Vorwand (20 min, colour, 2025) is shown. Arranged in the space, a waiting-room situation is suggested; perhaps the person entering is invited to take a seat on a chair placed against the wall. Behind a pushed-aside, two-part wall in the middle of the exhibition space, a third scenario opens up: passing through the wall, the audience enters a hotel room, a film set, a stage. The filmed interior is transmitted live onto the outer wall into the anteroom.

Through a public casting call, people have come forward who want to act in the film HONIGFALLE. The call asked: Would you like to be in a film? You can play either yourself or a fictional character. The shoot takes place in the constructed room. The live casting is a film shoot which, in turn, is a performance for the exhibition opening. This means that the casting participants are both audience and contributors within an overarching performative situation. Not everyone will appear in the finished film, and it remains open at what point the audience will be in the frame, and equally unclear which people may not wish to be filmed.

During the exhibition, an advertisement will be placed through which private time slots in the hourly hotel can be booked. The audience enters the hotel room and reshapes and fills it, starting from their own actions, into an ever-new setting – yet the material that arises remains invisible or unarchived.

The project engages with ascriptions, shifts in dimensions and ambiguities that accompany a cinematic gaze. What happens when the film itself is a casting, a performance, an hourly hotel? What roles do we assume? What roles are assigned to us? As in Raunkjaer’s film Die Vorwand, the exhibition HONIGFALLE moves within a fabric of fiction and reality that continually conditions itself. HONIGFALLE is to be understood as an inquiry into mechanisms and practices that blur the boundary between normality and fiction and, using cinematic means, relate to social and societal norms in our relationships and bodies. It is about power relations, about visibility and invisibility, about economies of desire, about staging and turning oneself into an image, and about which roles we take (or wish to take) within these images.

The exhibition HONIGFALLE playfully illuminates the simultaneous phenomena of devising one’s own honey-trap setting while at the same time falling into other honey traps oneself. Who is invited, who is selected, who is rejected? What longings and needs do people bring with them who wish to spend time in an hourly hotel? What desires are articulated by people who respond to an advertisement? HONIGFALLE embodies a paradox between agency (on the part of those who play) and being at the mercy of others (on the part of those invited).

Agnes, the protagonist in Signe Raunkjaer’s film Die Vorwand, moves carefully and elegantly through an everyday life that appears strange to her. She seems to be exhibiting herself anew and yet appears curious and delighted by the role assigned to her, living it out in an unusual way. The figure places herself from one situation into the next, testing out her own conversation, attempting to construct an image. She staggers through this kind of overworld, makes a provocatively bold start and then once again steps back. She drops what she has begun, breaks off actions, leading up to a final encounter whose outcome remains open. Within the exhibition, Die Vorwand occupies the double position of a prologue and a supposedly, seemingly finished product.