You must study the endgame before everything else.
(José Raúl Capablanca)



For the former machine hall of the coal mine Friedlicher Nachbar in Bochum, which is now mainly used for cultural purposes, this site-specific work was created in 1996, which addresses a global threat posed by pandemics. Like huge profaned church windows, the three Endgames works model the incidence of daylight and dominate the entire space of the hall.

Three different mate positions in chess are presented through visualizations of the respective force fields of the pieces rook (text boxes with quotes from Albert Camus' The Plague of 1947), bishop (excerpts from Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death of 1562), horse (microscopic views of the Ebola virus), and the losing king (abstracted excerpt from John S. Johnston's 1890 photograph of skaters in Central Park in front of the Dakota Building).











Today, the work is on permanent loan to the Machine Hall.