[This vivid first-person report on an unusual art installation that uses virtual reality to evoke both presence and disembodiment in disturbing but thought-provoking ways comes from artnet. See the original version of the story for three more images. –Matthew]

[Image: Installation view of Jordan Wolfson’s Little Room at the Fondation Beyeler. © Jordan Wolfson. Courtesy Gagosian, Sadie Coles HQ, and David Zwirner. Photo: Mark Niedermann.]

Jordan Wolfson’s New Virtual Reality Is Peak Body Horror

I cannot unsee what I saw in “Little Room,” the artist’s ambitious new work at the Fondation Beyeler.

By Kate Brown
June 24, 2025

Jordan Wolfson is known to assault the senses. He often does this by centering the body, using machination, animatronics, and other tech to create unsettling relationships between viewer and subject. Wolfson’s world includes: a chained puppet thrashing on the floor; a mannequin dancing while affixed on a mirrored wall; disembodied robotic arms clunking about with theatrical pathos; a first-person VR perspective on victimhood. I would not have expected having my own body snatched from me in his most recent work to be the most horrifying of them all.

At the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Wolfson’s new work Little Room at first glance reads more as tech lab than art show. The artist’s virtual reality work—a medium with which he has been experimenting since 2017—is physically and psychologically involved. Getting set up [for] the experience is akin to getting through airport security while queuing up for a blood donation. To start, you have to get your entire body scanned, eye retinae included. For this, there is a full-body scanner that you need to step into, involving 96 cameras. Once you have lined up your body according to very specific cues from one of the Beyeler workers, your form is captured in one massive multidirectional flash, creating a detailed 3D model of yourself that is then uploaded into the VR environment.

Even those with “Jordan Wolfson’s Family and Friends” stickers have to wait. The queue itself became a mini spectacle during Art Basel—a patience test in an attention economy. At its most expedient, Little Room requires 30 minutes. During Art Basel, it was a lot longer than that. Either way, this waiting also feels essential. There is a ritual quality to the waiting and pairing up (you enter the VR experience as a couple) that makes it feel as if the whole experience is part of the “little room,” not just the twelve minutes inside the VR. The whole thing is awkward, invasive, mundane, and socially intense.

Everyone at different stages of waiting looks on as eight pairs of people stumble around with headsets. Those facing off in the VR are doing all kinds of weird things: some are mirroring each other, others are looking at their own hands. Some are sitting down on the ground. Some are trying to chat to each other through the noise-canceling head-sets (without much success, it seemed). But many are simply staring at each other, quite noticeably still.

The latter makes sense once you yourself enter the experience. You find not much else except yourself and someone else in what appears to be a tiled room (I was paired with a Geneva-based gentleman from a Swiss family office). Inside the VR, you notice almost immediately that you have swapped bodies. And while one may think that the most compelling aspect of this work is to be inside another body, the surprise is that you are wholly distracted by an eerie urge to watch yourself being occupied by the conscience of someone else. A mirror slowly floats over, and each participant is faced with their own reflection, but as each other. In my experience, we looked across the mirror at ourselves, crossing gazes, seemingly similarly transfixed. (Hence, the stillness one observes while waiting.) My partner stared at me (himself) through the mirror as I gestured around awkwardly from inside his body, waving (at myself). Wolfson’s own voice himself spoke out of my mouth (my partner’s mouth). “God murdered me,” I watched myself say. “Look at your hands, I love you. Look at your hands, I hate you.”

All of this is pretty horrific. It is horrific to see your own eyes train themselves on yourself with a strange fascination one usually reserves for private checks in the mirror on the way out the door. Wolfson has brought us into a dissociation with our own bodies in the most visceral way. There is no blood, no guts, and no screams, heard or seen—none of the theatrics typical of body horror. But there is a mutation of the body and a profound loss of agency. Wolfson’s magic mirror hovers, and you follow it because you want to keep on staring. And even if you do not, Wolfson insists we look. Eyelids feel stuck open, Clockwork Orange-style. The gaze becomes a trap. It cracks open a shell of psychic privacy you didn’t know you had.

Many VR works I have experienced are all about point-of-view; VR’s power is its ability to create a highly realistic first-person experience. So Little Room, which is aesthetically austere, feels both extremely real and very clearly unreal. Wolfson doesn’t use VR to immerse us so much as to estrange us. Its minimalism—a tiled purgatory with little else but two subjects—enhances that estrangement. As such, it feels less aligned with the lush world-building of many other artists working with VR simulations, like Ian Cheng or Lawrence Lek, and more in conversation with conceptual experiments like Lygia Clark’s 1967 performance The I and the You, which I saw recently at the Neue Nationalgalerie. In Clark’s piece, two participants don hazmat-style gendered bodysuits joined by a cord, enacting a kind of tactile role reversal under the supervision of a museum docent. The interaction is slow, awkward, and intimate, mediated by costume and institutional structure. Clark’s work, like Wolfson’s, pushes the body toward collapse—not through illusion, but through an awkward setup and relational dissonance.

But where Clark creates a shared vulnerability, Little Room produces a kind of cold mutual possession. The screen is our new cloak to wear, and that changes things, doesn’t it? Clark’s piece has a ritualistic softness; Wolfson’s, by contrast, leans into the psychic violation that is so much a part of the way we peer at ourselves and one another in virtual spaces. In the more embodied take, one builds empathy; but Little Room ushers in a strangely panicked narcissism. But unlike the tale of Narcissus, who fell so in love with his own reflection that he burned up and became a flower, we don’t get to transform. We are just left there, unresolved, a little broken.

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“Little Room” by Jordan Wolfson is on view at the Fondation Beyeler until August 3, 2025.