The yoga and exhibition space Y8 in Hamburg occupies the attic of a prewar building. Its interior is white throughout. Strips of black masking tape on the floor normally mark out a grid of eight by eight fields. The grid takes up the entire room and reflects the philosophy of Sivananda Yoga. The curator Marc Glöde invited me to contribute to the exhibition series Re-Locating the Self, asking me to create a work that would respond to the room. I decided to integrate the orthogonal grid, which structures Y8’s yoga practice, into my piece. I had the rectangular field taped on the floor in gray instead of black and then added the bilateral-diagonal pattern in red tape. Superimposing the nine fields of the bilateral grid on the eight by eight fields, my intervention, titled Bilateral–Diagonal, undercut the dominance of the orthogonal pattern. The red grid’s diagonal axis stood out, impressing an unwonted spatial orientation on the studio’s patrons, though without disrupting the everyday operation of the yoga school. Rather, it was a gesture that offered the visitors and users of the yoga and gallery space a different experience of the space and their presence in it.
