Inert and enigmatic, a black rectangle is difficult to decipher without the ghost of Modernism coming to mind. Or could it be a small chamber for torture? Or a black Neolithic stone, emitting radio signals like the one buried four million years ago in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)? Could it just be what it seems - a rectangular object made of cardboard and varnished in glossy black resin? Heimo Zobernig's Untitled (1986) is none of these. A medium-sized box, big enough to fit a person sitting, it was built following the dimensions of Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulator, a controversial device celebrated in America in the 1950s as the 'orgasm box'. The Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, who was persecuted by Nazis, psychoanalysts, Marxists and the FBI, invented the accumulator for medical purposes. Following his belief that sexual repression was bourgeois in character and that all neuroses were caused by repressed blockages of orgone energy, Reich maintained that people would be able to emancipate themselves and transform the world if they managed to free their own genitals.

The difficulty in deciphering the meaning and implications of Reich's speculative and therapeutic work is analogous to the difficulty in classifying Zobernig's practice. Mainly shown and discussed within German-speaking art circuits, Zobernig's production consists of paintings, texts, objects, graphic and architectural designs, videos, symposia, furniture and even musical performances shifting back and forth from theoretical seriousness to deadpan humour. Often described as engaging in an ironic deconstruction of a formalist vocabulary, Zobernig has produced a free, reticular system of associations between form and content in over twenty years of activity. The apparently inexpressive, silent materiality of his visual style may