A man cave is usually understood as a private kingdom where masculinity goes to relax: screens, cables, gym equipment, bad furniture, adolescent fantasies, and the comforting illusion that nobody is watching. Patrick Alan Banfield takes this cultural cliché literally, then makes it misbehave.

One enters Man Cave through a white camouflage net, as if crossing into a soft military zone, a teenage hideout, or a very confused bunker. Inside, the floor is covered with waterproof pond liner, giving the room the strange atmosphere of something prepared for leakage, sweat, spillage or emotional flooding. The windows are coated with iridescent foil, tinting the city outside according to the viewer’s angle. Even Berlin becomes unstable here: pink, green, artificial, complicit.

The installation contains three video works, each embedded in its own viewing situation. The spectator does not simply stand politely in front of art. One lies down on a filthy mattress under an even filthier blanket, entering the eternal summer holiday of a teenage boy who has discovered bed, boredom and shame. Another viewer sits on a fitness bike, consuming moving images through the absurd promise of self-optimization. In My View, a VR work, the visitor turns on an office chair, immersed in what appears to be a private field of vision, while everyone else can watch that supposedly private gaze on a monitor.

The room becomes less a cave than a trap with mood lighting: seductive, pathetic, intimate, comic and hostile. Banfield stages masculinity as an interior design problem, a media problem, and finally a viewing problem. In this cave, privacy is only another performance.