COPENHAGEN, DENMARK.- Statens Museum for Kunst will present Jeppe Hein: Invisible Maze 10 June - 27 August 2006. Interaction and virtual claustrophobia go hand in hand in this summer's exhibition in x-rummet at Statens Museum for Kunst. The Danish artist Jeppe Hein invites you to enter his installation project Invisible Maze.

In recent years Jeppe Hein (b.1974) has stood out as a new comet within the Danish and international art scenes. His subtle, yet attention-grabbing installations have challenged the museum space and audience behaviour with their equal measures of playful inventiveness and critical edge. The keyword in Jeppe Hein's work is interaction. His pieces take the concept that art only lives in immediate dialogue with the observer to its logical conclusion - for example when he lets spectators activate a large iron ball which wrecks the space it occupies during the exhibition period, or when he lets a fountain interact with the movements of passers-by - the latter work will be featured at Præstø Kunstforening from 3 June. In other words, audience presence and participation completes Jeppe Hein's technically sophisticated and demanding works, transforming them into – art.

Invisible Maze - The emptiness awaiting visitors to the x-rummet at Statens Museum for Kunst is deceptive. A visual deceit which warns us that the artist has suspended and disabled our favourite sensory tool, the sense of sight. Like the proverbial mad inventor, Jeppe Hein has created an invisible maze that only materialises as we move around in it. Visitors are equipped with a set of digital headphones operated by infrared rays that cause them to vibrate every time you bump into one of the maze's virtual walls. Thus, the exhibition is perceived as a both minimalist and spectacular playground which abolishes traditional rituals and conditions applying to exhibition venues, art audiences, and works of art. The maze structure spans a total of six different variants, all of them referring to authentic labyrinths from our common cultural history. From the famous medieval labyrinth in Chartres to Stanley Kubrick's fateful dead end from the film The Shining to Pac-Man. The maze in x-rummet changes from day to day, inviting visitors to make repeat visits.

The exhibition in x-rummet represents a further development of the exhibition Invisible Labyrinth which attracted 50,000 visitors during its two-month run at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris last year.

Jeppe Hein lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen. He studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Städel Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt and has exhibited his works at many venues in Denmark and abroad, e.g. at the Venice Biennial and the PS1 MoMA in New York. Next year Jeppe Hein's exhibition schedule will take him to Tate Modern in London.