optician’s shop turned art installation satirizes bio-tracking tech

The Factory Art Installation at Uncanny Shifts

At Uncanny Shifts, an exhibition by Urbane Künste Ruhr set in reused spaces around Dortmund Train Station in Germany, Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard and Zayne Armstrong’s installation, The Factory, occupies a former optician’s shop. Walking down a street with a jazz bar, a hunting store, and a smattering of restaurants, it’s almost easy to miss the installation if it weren’t for a pile of inflatable figures pressing up against a glass case that would have formerly housed optical advertisements or product offerings. Within, a mise-en-scène emerges of a strangely ornate historic building-turned gym, bejeweled with ziplocked phones and embedded screens that lead the way into a short animated film bearing the name Charli & The Factory (2024).

In this immersive space, the duo create a hybrid video, painting, and sculptural environment that tells the story of a journalist, Charli, who is pursuing what could be a career-defining reportage on a FitWatch—a kind of bio-tracking smartwatch—that gets its users to achieve their goals no matter the cost. Aasgaard and Armstrong take us into The Factory, the gym in which the tale takes place, to consider ideas of labor, the body, and how we operate within contemporary capitalist dynamics. The artists most effectively introduce the project on their site themselves by saying: ‘Welcome to The Factory, where scandals sweat, and every step on the treadmill takes you closer to the edge.’

installation view from Uncanny Shifts, Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard & Zayne Armstrong, The Factory, 2026 | all images by Henning Rogge © Urbane Künste Ruhr unless stated otherwise

The Factory Fitness Studio

Upon entering the former optician’s shop in Dortmund, it’s difficult to quite make out what has been set in motion, as there are a whirl of figures and characters abound. Most noticeable within this scene are the painted figures of Transformers, the robots from the massively successful franchise, rendered in primary colors and luxe chromes, taking selfies with actual smartphones that are zipped up in clear baggies and embedded in cutouts within the paintings. It’s unfit, though, to call these paintings. They are more akin to the backdrops or scenics found setting the scene of a play than something found on a gallery wall. When looking closely at each panel—angled and arranged to create the artists’ medieval-gym-turned-surveillance center—one can see that the paintings are created over photos of a fairly mundane Berlin during the day.

The inside of this ‘gym’ was derived from a hodgepodge of temporally disparate paintings that range from Scenes from the Life of Saint Bertin and the Annunciation to Mary with prophets and evangelists (Simon Marmion, 1459), The Annunciation (Piero del Pollaiuolo, 1480), to Woman at a Window (Caspar David Friedrich, 1822). In this way, they evoke a kind of aesthetic and temporal weirdness that points to the strange temporal setting of contemporary Europe, with its trains and metros that zip underneath 16th-century castles, startups and luxury brands occupying offices in galleria buildings. In all these atemporal elements, they begin to nudge at the strangeness of contemporary life and its dredges of the past that still appear.

the inside of this ‘gym’ was derived from a hodgepodge of temporally disparate paintings referenced by the artists

Inflatable Bodies vs. Chrome Transformers

Just as they greeted visitors into the space, more of the inflatable sculptures whip around the interior of the installation. The duo have referenced Henry Moore’s works as the core inspiration behind their vaguely human forms. Positioned above large, very visible fans, their bodies expand and contract, filling their neutral-colored forms. They themselves are ‘working out,’ not so dissimilar to how one’s muscles would tense and relax or how their spine would curl while doing reps at a gym. With these creatures, so flaccid and flexible in front of the rigid, shining Transformers, they call into question the idea of the body. What does it mean to occupy a humanoid form? And what are the responsibilities that one has to take care of it, track it, and conceive of something that’s always in flux?

just as they greeted visitors into the space, more of the inflatable sculptures whip around the interior of the installation