On the evidence of his new installation at the Whitechapel Gallery, the young German artist Tobias Rehberger is something of a prankster. The foyer of the gallery, antechamber to the exhibition, is decorated with wallpaper that recalls the garish styles favoured by interior designers of the 1970s, but which turns out, on closer inspection, to be formed from a repeated pattern of brightly tinted photographs of some of the artist’s internal organs. Once inside the main ground floor galleries of the Whitechapel, the visitor is confronted by the fetchingly titled Pumpkin Me, a work which consists of a suspended rectangular room-within-the room, painted in blindingly bright pumpkin orange, to which access is provided – as to an unusually low tree house – by a five-rung ladder leading to a narrow circular entrance.

Clambering up and into Rehberger’s rectilinear refuge, one enters a space which is entirely without illumination, at least for much of the time. So members of the audience are liable to spend much of their time blundering into one another. The obscurity of the setting has other, comical side-effects. On the day of my visit, an evidently disconcerted secondary school art teacher was stoically attempting to enthuse her charges with a passion for contemporary installation practice by persuading them that Pumpkin Me was Rehberger’s way of making them think about the nature of darkness. “Is it comforting? Is it threatening? Think about what it makes you feel…” The consensus view seemed to be that it was just rather boring.

In fact the interior of Rehberger’s installation is sporadically illuminated, albeit sometimes very sporadically, by the remote agency of a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Mannheim, in Germany. Whenever this particular schoolboy turns on the light in his faraway bedroom, it activates a remote trigger which in turn switches on...

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