Located in the idyllic grounds of the castle, the gallery itself provides a counterpoint to the darker themes in Sasnal’s work. The space is attractive and bright with wood floors, rustic attic beams, exposed brick features, and clean white walls where shadows form and fade as the sun slips behind the clouds and day cedes to night. On entering the space, one takes inordinate pleasure in the unexpectedness of this fresh and modern gallery tucked into the grounds of a centuries-old castle, but that mere minute of reverie is rudely interrupted by an angry surge of music growling from a TV screen. As one registers the aggressive twang of electric guitar filtering though the serene surroundings of the gallery, a whole new unexpectedness takes shape whereby the vigour and potency of this choice of music heightens the experience and energy of the exhibition throughout.

Since the beginning of his career, music has been an essential reference point for Sasnal and, indeed, the title of this exhibition is borrowed from that of a song by English alternative rock band, Spacemen 3. Therefore, Sasnal’s use of music here is almost certainly a calculated move on his part. And what a choice of music it is: ‘Dirt’ by The Stooges, taken from their 1970 proto-punk album, Fun House, hailed by critics as a landmark composition in avant-garde rock. In using music as raw and reckless as this to play on loop and aloud, Sasnal right away makes it clear that the journey to the ‘Other Side’ is going to be bold and bumpy one.

The sweaty urgency of The Stooges’ music befits Sasnal’s edgy and unpolished style of painting, particularly corresponding with the sort of smudgy imprecision of his portraits. For example, his pair of paintings of Valdemar Hjartvar Købke hanging on opposite walls, present the seaman as emerging from a mud-brown sludge where skin and background melt into one another in grimy uncertainty. What makes these small but compelling portraits all the more interesting is their history: Købke has been preserved in paint before by his brother, the Danish painter, Christen Købke – a contemporary of Andersen’s. In a portrait dating from 1838, Valdemar is depicted similarly in his naval attire, but with striking clarity and compelling likeness. In comparison, Sasnal’s portraits share none of the original’s luminosity or psychological intensity. Indeed, these portraits veer dramatically from the history of portraiture in that they do not seek to capture any innate ‘essence’ of the sitter’s character or self. Rather, Sasnal’s portraits appear to share more in common with hasty, hollow caricatures rather than the grandiose genre of naturalistic portraiture, whereby the mucky daubs of brown paint, which crudely resemble smears of bodily waste, sneer at the seeming impossibility of reproducing that mode in current conditions.

On the front facing wall, a series of paintings more explicitly engage with the Andersen theme. Among these is a square painting of a shoemaker, naively rendered in broad, sloppy brushstrokes of monochromatic greys and blacks, and a corresponding painting of pixie boots. Cobblers and shoes are common tropes in Andersen’s tales such as ‘The Red Shoes’, recalling his own personal heritage as a shoemaker’s son. Nearby, a purplish-hued painting presents a winged orb hovering listlessly in an airless twilight realm, like a planet in outer space. Titled J. Ch. Andersen 5, the work not only references Andersen in its name, but the image itself is almost directly lifted from an illustration of Andersen’s tale, ‘The Top and Ball’, in a collection of stories published during Sasnal’s childhood in 1970s’ Poland. In its magnified scale (150 x 150 cms), the image assumes a new sinister significance.

Mid-flight, the ball is a bad omen, and with bated breath we wait for it plummet and crash to earth.

Indeed, Take Me To The Other Side operates precisely on these tenuous feelings of fear and trepidation, seizing on our anxieties about what it is that we do not know. A startling untitled landscape of mismatched styles further works to intensify and cement this sense of dread curdling at the base of the exhibition. Here, in a similarly ominous vein to J. Ch. Andersen 5, a black, anthropomorphic object resembling some sort of bird or aviation mechanism (in fact, it is the saddle of the artist’s bike) lingers in low flight against a blue sky and cotton wool clouds – a skyscape that eerily recalls those of René Magritte. This uncanny object is the emblem of the exhibition: a strange achievement of engineering that bears an unsettling likeness to an oversized black crow – a creature symbolically linked to death and sadness. In another work, Autumn Landscape with a Man Gathering Wood, a flock, or rather a ‘murder’ of crows, descends on the frozen grey landscape as the very harbingers of death and destruction.

Soon that destruction becomes much less a fear than a reality. Autumn Landscape with a Man Gathering Wood is a re-working of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich destroyed in a fire in Munich in 1931. Hanging directly opposite this work, is a large scale, ink-on-paper poster depicting a labourer driving a horse-drawn cart with an inked rendition of the Friedrich painting in the background. Aptly titled, Burned Painting, this work anticipates apocalypse. As the brash speech bubbles read: ‘Let the fire burn the sky first the ground and the man. Let it then burn the birds’. We are in no doubt then that doom is upon us, and still Iggy Pop drawls: ‘I don’t care, ‘cause I’m burning inside’.

Somehow, Sasnal has achieved it: he has taken us to the other side, an absurd, dark and frightful place where once-picturesque landscapes are now saturated in toxic, acidic green (as in an untitled work from 2012). In Sasnal’s world, Romanticism has collided with careless rebellion: a smouldering skull, that icon of immortality and of vanitas, floats in a similarly poisonous mist of lurid, unreal green, and menacing hooded-figures are reflected in the eye sockets. It is only then that we can finally concentrate on what is unfolding on the TV screen: close-up shots of Nike running shoes repeatedly stuffed with crusts of white bread and the leaves of a book – The Business Solution to Poverty – squashed with slices of the loaf. The video titled Unreal Hunger (2014) is loosely based on the Andersen story, ‘The Girl Who Trod On The Loaf’, about a vain girl who steps on a loaf of bread in order to keep her shoes clean – an action that ultimately brings about her muddy descent into the underworld. It becomes apparent then that Sasnal is not merely preoccupied with re-creating fairytales and history, but is concerned with our current situation of poverty versus wastefulness, and more generally, what is to become of this world as we know it. Like the girl who trod on the loaf, we will need to be more careful.

The mechanisms and rituals of a given environment, and the complex relationship between viewer and object are what particularly interest Koťátková and Lang. In presenting a space encumbered by sculptural objects and detritus, Joseph Beuys’ theatrical approach to sculpture immediately comes to mind. In thinking of Beuys’ work – in particular his dynamic room environments such as End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85) and Hearth I and II (1968/74 and 1978-79) – Wasteland can be appreciated in terms of how it engages the viewer through direct involvement and movement within the space. There are visual cues that evoke Beuys too: the irregular slices of cement are reminiscent of Beuys’ infamous wodges of unctuous, slippery fat; the employment of everyday objects, including umbrellas and bicycles, albeit sheathed in brown paper, can also be considered as a Beuysian element; and the railings that line the back wall again recall the metal rods that feature in many of Beuys’ environments.

Beuys’ work is frequently considered in terms of traumatic memory and the dangers of its repression. Whilst this aspect is not necessarily made explicit in Wasteland, ideas of concealment and covering over are central to the experience of the installation on both a visual and figurative level. In the lower left hand corner of the room, an obsessive smattering of round objects of varying lumpy shapes, wrapped in ubiquitous brown paper, are loosely organised in size, with the occasional larger oblong package obstructing the neatness of the order. The assortment of paper parcels provokes a childlike curiosity to peel back the paper and reveal the prize underneath. Yet, at the same time, these boxes and parcels, in some cases carefully tied with string, are troubling for what they conceal: what is hidden underneath and do we really want to know?

As the title suggests, an atmosphere of doom and gloom permeates the space, almost as though there is in fact a hidden trauma here that one is not yet privy to. The brown-papered rails at the far end of the room, evoking perhaps the Gothic fencing of a graveyard, suggest a state of constraint or imprisonment . Through the use of displaced tree trunks and bare branches, salvaged objects and the mound of rot-brown leaves in the enclosure, a dreary air of decay and desolation pervades Wasteland; so much so that it is impossible not to be reminded of T.S. Eliot’s bleak imagery in his eponymous poem: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?’ (The Waste Land, 1922).

Yet the sense of the dismal disorder of the installation is perhaps only a surface appraisal of what Koťátková and Lang are actually trying to achieve. A series of 32 framed letters on black A4 paper hang on the right wall nearest the entrance. The letters reveal one side of a conversation written from what we presume to be the artists’ perspective, or some fictionalized version of it: the letters are signed ‘E’ for Eva or ‘D’ for Dominik – to some anonymous ‘Sir’ (as in ‘Dear Sir’). Whether one opts to read the correspondence on entering the installation or after having wandered about the space for some time (as I chose to do), one’s perception of Wasteland is irrevocably changed on encountering the documents.

From reading the letters, Wasteland somewhat bizarrely emerges as a park in limbo, a ‘hypothetical place’ awaiting a suitable relocation. Following the closure of their local park, the letters record how ‘E’ and ‘D’ are looking to transfer the objects of the park to a new location, and eventually how plans have been made, approved and then halted. Among the correspondence is an itemised list of man-made and natural objects that comprise a typical park, many of which can be identified in the given surroundings: ‘a young apple tree’, ‘a book that someone has forgotten on a bench wrapped in paper’, ‘a forgotten umbrella’, ‘236 stones’, ’10 fence segments’ and even a ‘fragment of sidewalk with a rain puddle’.

Wasteland, then, effectively presents a storeroom, and there is a poignancy to the items’ unrealised status. Yet even more than that, Wasteland, as park-to-be, invokes a scene of grim but playful absurdity, not unlike that of a Beckett play. A bench propped on its side, an enormous steely crescent (presumably the ‘metal playground structure’ on the itemised list), turned sideways like an oddly spherical ladder, and a soundtrack of water trickling yet not a single drop to be found, all suggest the sort of mischievous humour characteristic of the absurd.

On exiting the exhibition, that familiar feeling of ‘what was all that about’ creeps up, and one cannot help but feel a little deflated. It is not so much a feeling of let-down as it is confusion tinged with the tragicomic nature of it all. The typed correspondence does not only illuminate the ways in which our lives and spaces are dictated by bureaucratic structures and institutions, but, somewhat ironically, how the viewer’s sense of space is equally governed by the rules and practices imposed by the gallery as institution. In light of this, Wasteland precariously exists as both exhibition and store cupboard.

However, in drawing attention to how our perception of space changes through knowledge and involvement, the experience of Wasteland, much like Beuys’ project of ‘Social Sculpture’, is transformative. By way of the viewer’s active engagement, Wasteland, with its strange alignment of park facility, bureaucratic site and art gallery, propels its visitors to reconsider the ways in which space is shaped and framed by institutional structures as opposed to passive acceptance of their rules and authority.