Alina Rentsch’s site-specific installation Booth (2025) transforms the corner space into a site of distortion and shifting vantage points. A printed carpet spans the floor, producing an anamorphic illusion of an imagined sub-level that resolves only from a precise viewpoint. Paired with a single lamp installed on the truss above, which voices an excerpt from her fair proposal, the work engages the booth as both a commercial metric and an image-producing apparatus. Playing with seventeenth-century perspective boxes, economic thresholds, textual fragments, and the shifting position of the viewer, Rentsch situates the booth between image and infrastructure, illusion and document.

The installation unfolds through language-like markers that oscillate between syntax and semantics, suggesting the potential of use and its inscribed narrative. These elements form a vocabulary that points at once to trade, logistics, and functionality, while also invoking fiction, illusion, and grammar. Central to this vocabulary is the kitchen, a site traditionally associated with transformation, which now operates as a metaphor for translation: the processing of raw material into consumable form, whether culinary, linguistic, or economic. It also functions as a social marker, recalling the kitchen as a space of gathering, conversation, and colloquial speech in contrast to the formal language of the fair booth.

Within the context of the fair, this intimate infrastructure appears as an estranging device. The insertion of a domestic, uniform space into the commercial logic of the booth unsettles the threshold between private and public, utility and display. In this way, Rentsch’s Booth exposes the fair architecture not simply as a container, but as a stage where infrastructures of language, economy, and perception are continuously translated into image.

Alina Rentsch (b. 1992, Berlin) lives and works in Berlin. She holds a BFA from Weißensee Academy of Art, Berlin and graduated with a MFA from Konstfack, Stockholm in 2022. She has participated in exhibitions, programs, and workshops at Linienstraße, Düsseldorf; Petrine, Paris (both 2024); Vapaan Taiteen Tila, Helsinki (2023); Petrine, Paris; Ehemalige Postsparkasse, Vienna; Index–The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; B7L9 Art Station by Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunis; Magito/Suvilahti, Helsinki; Studio Giardini, IASPIS program during the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice; Nordiska Konstförbundet, Stockholm (all 2022); Salon am Moritzplatz, Berlin (2021); Konsthall C, Stockholm (2019); and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2018).