The hotel: a place where travellers and/or lovers rendezvous or rest; a visit possibly forgotten in its transience or remembered by its intensity. The title suggests a connection with the USA by its namesake in New York. So, while sleeping in Germany, the visitor may dream away continents and escape to cold-war-distant America. 1995, the year in which, fifty years later, the end of the war and the liberation of the concentration camps are remembered in Europe, ‘Hotel Chelsea – Köln’, the video, filmed site specifically, is an unlikely memorial.

Visual scenarios in this artwork seem to bear little relationship to the narrative – what one sees only indirectly illustrates the voice-over and textual accounts. Alongside the many related incidents of hypocrisy and prejudice in everyday encounters, the spectator is forced to choose between what is seen and what is heard. The images render rituals of courtship and sex where the less conventional gender role-play is a deceptive ploy to further divert attention from the disturbing accounts - the sexual imagery allows no escapist fantasy.

Only some of the texts are concerned directly with the theme of remembrance; these are incorporated into descriptions of contemporary life in Germany; the general atmosphere is of a post: -war, wall, feminist, Modern - malaise. All German texts are repeated in English translation. Repetition is an integral part of the piece, where errors of judgement and bad behaviour are repeated in different situations.

Tanya Ury