For this exhibition, the Museum für Gegenwartskunst reconstructs a work the American artist Robert Gober created specifically for its ground floor hall: the installation Split Wall with Drains (1994–95). The piece stands at the center of a show dedicated for the most part to works by Gober held by the collections of the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung and the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation. After the major survey exhibition held at the Schaulager, Basel, in 2007, this eminent oeuvre, in which replicas of domestic objects such as washbasins, fireplaces, and drains, effigies of body parts, and reproductions of specific spaces with institutional or religious connotations play a central part, will be presented to the public in a new exhibition produced once again in close collaboration with the artist.

The motif of the drain to which Gober returns here appears early in his work: starting in 1989, he designed a number of simple but individual plugholes, had them cast, and then installed them directly in the walls of exhibition spaces (Drains). The drain marks the boundary between light and darkness, between what is visible and what is concealed, between inside and outside.