The Altered World of ‘Level Up’

The Level Up exhibition by GAFFA at Kunsthalle Arbon is an invitation to immerse oneself in an artistic experience that challenges every convention of space and perception. What initially reads as a simple parking garage transforms, upon entry, into something monumental — each element meticulously designed to provoke reflection.

GAFFA, an artistic collective founded nine years ago, has built its identity on a precise blend of humor and irony, deploying photography, sculpture, and installation to interrogate the everyday environments we take for granted. In Level Up, traffic and its symbols become the exhibition’s animating force — a meditation on the thin line that separates regulation from chaos.

The Swiss gallery transports visitors into an underground parking structure, where a sleek limousine sits surrounded by safety cones and traffic signs that appear lifted from a dream. The mundane is rendered surreal; an apparently banal object acquires an entirely new life within an artistic context.

GAFFA’s installations — among them a cardboard snail gliding across the gallery floor — compel visitors to reconsider their relationship with spaces they inhabit without ever truly seeing. “Underground parking garages are places we normally notice only in passing,” the gallery observes, drawing attention to the singular aesthetic and rigid geometry these structures impose upon us.

An unsettling question takes hold: how does one get out? In its artistic interpretation, Level Up plays against our daily experience and the low-grade anxiety of being trapped underground. The work urges a re-evaluation of these ‘non-places,’ inviting us to see beyond the obvious and to reckon honestly with the built environments we move through on autopilot.

Level Up stands as a compelling testament to contemporary art’s capacity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary — and to open, in the most familiar of spaces, an unexpected conversation about meaning.