Peles Empire is a collaborative artistic project consisting of two artists, Katharina Stöver and Barbara Wolff, whose work takes its consistent source (and name) from a single site: a lavish nineteenth century castle in Romania.
For Formation, the artists used the Grand Armoury in Peles Castle as their original source; the shining metallic surfaces of the armour, as well as the room’s distinctive chessboard floor, can be discerned, but only just. The image itself is never fully disclosed: as though seen through the flickering glitches of a corrupted image file, the armoury appears only in glimpses, its spatial depth reduced to an abstracted flatness. By inverting the armoury’s threedimensional space – best represented in its patterned floor, like the recessive pattern of a Renaissance painting – the images return the live experience of an historical space to the mediated one of contemporary visual overload.