Schneider’s interest in duplication became even more explicit in works outside the house in Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, such as The Schneider Family (2004). Here he chose two adjoining houses with identical fronts and furnished them identically. In each he placed one of identical female twins, who acted according to a script identically and simultaneously. In fact, the house seemed to be its own reflection, and the viewers knew that what they saw was replicated in identical format outside their field of vision. The duplication interface, which generates an inner gap and inaccessibility, appears also in his gigantic veiled cube (Cube Hamburg, 2007), a work that dialogued with the Kaaba in Mecca by means of abstraction and duplication.

The work at the exhibition Cryo-Tank Phoenix 2 is related to the repetition Schneider has used in his works. A tall, hermetically closed electropolished stainless steel cylinder, this work was first exhibited in churches in Naples and Cologne and intersects with the discourse on conservation at low temperature–a practice that implies the possibility of future resurrection, of return to life. Schneider thus means to reshuffle our prior knowledge on the body’s life and death and on the boundary between them.

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