At the packed and noisy opening event of Expulsion from Paradise, a wall of 20 flickering televisions blaring out incoherent snatches of sound slowly propelled unsuspecting gallery visitors on to the street. Fixed to a base of two small trolleys, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the sculpture could move.

The work was conceived in the month immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Hausmeister toured Berlin TV repair shops looking for defunct televisions with which to build the screen for this monumental work. His aim was to create something of the feeling of claustrophobia of living in East Germany where Western TV was the only window onto the outside world. For East Germans West Berlin represented a kind of paradise, although the authorities in the East did everything they could to interfere with the signal.