1000 Doors is difficult to describe. Like all art installations, the intention of the artist is personal and ambiguous, the meaning being up to the interpretation of the viewer.
Set up in the Garden of Unearthly Delights, 1000 Doors is a dark choose-your-own adventure in which you take your time journeying through the labyrinth of doors presented. You enter at your own risk and take your time to absorb the unique experience. A half an hour is the recommended time-frame, but you can take all the time you need.
Lining up, you’ll be greeted by a guide ready explains the simple rules: don’t break anything, don’t steal anything, and if you feel uncomfortable at any time you are free to leave.
Walking inside, you are confronted with a long hallway with loud fluorescent lights down the centre. Wallpaper, beautiful but hanging ripped from walls stained with unknown liquid. Blurry black and white photographs scattered around the floor. Sounds, impossible to pinpoint, seeping through the walls, the effect is loud and all encompassing.
Initially, you might be waiting for the classic haunted house jump-scare. This experience is so much more than that. A journey through time and genre, I was completely immersed in the four walls and varying doors presented to me. Choosing your own path through the winding corridors and oddly shaped rooms, you are one with the art around you.
A feeling of unease propels you through the myriad of time and experience. At once not here, nor there. Not in the present or the past, but somewhere different entirely, surrounded by the echoes of the voices of those who came before you.
If you can find the exit, you will experience the installation peaking in a divine crescendo of sight and sound. Returning to the bright and brilliant Fringe is a sharp jolt back to reality from a world not quite our own.
Encouraged to touch the surrounds, backtrack and interact, 1000 Doors is a truly sensory experience. I would recommend that someone wishing to attend bring along a friend to share the experience, or just have someone else open the doors for you. You never know what’s behind the next door. For anyone curious to see what fears and curiosities might await in the space beyond, 1000 Doors is a place for you.
I give 4 stars for a show that leaves you thinking: how and where did someone find this many doors?
4/5 stars
Words by Sarah Ingham
1000 Doors is on every day apart from 17/2/2020.
For more information and for tickets click here.
Tulpa Magazine 