Red Herring (Piet’s Escape Room) (2025)
Huis Bosschaert, Laren

What’s the phrase about wanting a holiday to be over? The assumption with escape rooms is that you want to get out. An escape room comprises a set of puzzles, which, attempted by groups, can reveal a route to freedom. Artificial conditions create heightened stakes. Urgency is enacted. There is a time limit and impending failure. A red herring is what you call an irrelevant puzzle that game designers introduce to distract players from escaping on time, and create confusion, frustration.

Red Herring (Piet’s Escape Room) runs the genre of horror through the filter of neo-plastic abstraction and reconstitutes it as a filmed musical revue. For his first presentation connected to The Mondrian Prize, Ivan Cheng has run a short workshop with students from Laar & Berg, with the intention to activate the garden, terrace and interior of Huis Bosschaert - the last house designed by architect Gerrit Rietveld. On 1 July, Cheng will be be joined by Sophia Dinkel, Max Grund, Arvo Leo, with garments by Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann and Ossi Lehtonen) in a filmed performance of the workshop outcomes.
Cheng’s nine-month project, Deposition / L’éphémère est éternel, takes as its point of departure an unrealised model Piet Mondrian once conceived for a work of “anti-theatre,” and anchors itself in the time Mondrian lived in Laren during World War I.

Photos Trees Heil