All posts tagged installations

Felicity Hammond: V3 Model Collapse @ the Photographers’ Gallery

The main reason for visiting the Photographers’ Gallery at the moment is to see the hugely enjoyable exhibition of wonderful photos of the 1970s society, reggae and punk rock by Dennis Morris. But if you’re there it’s worth making the effort to check out this much more challenging installation by contemporary photo-artist Felicity Hammond.

As ‘V3’ suggests this is the third of a series of four installations. They are about contemporary issues around the brave new world of digital imagery, artificial intelligence, and their real-world costs and implications.

The key concept is model collapse which has at least two meanings.

AI model collapse

In the digital realm it refers to the progressive deterioration in quality of AI outputs. First generation AI is trained on all the content of the internet (which contains plenty that is imperfect or misleading). AI then generates a new generation of content which contains all the errors it inherited and adds countless ‘hallucinations’ and errors of its own. The next generation is then trained on a totality of data which contains a large amount of errors, and in turn generates fresh errors. Thus the introduction of artificial intelligence tools will inevitably and unstoppably lead to the degradation of information on the internet.

With conscious irony, here’s a definition of model collapse generate by Google AI:

Model collapse in AI refers to the phenomenon where generative models, trained on their own or other models’ outputs (synthetic data), degrade in performance over time. This degradation manifests as reduced diversity, increased bias, and ultimately, the model producing nonsensical or repetitive outputs. Essentially, the model ‘learns’ to imitate its own errors, leading to a decline in its ability to accurately represent the original data distribution.

Environmental collapse

At the same time as the digital world is being irreversibly degraded so, of course, is the real world. Presumably everyone knows that making AI work requires enormous new datacentres, in vast air-conditioned warehouses which, of course, use up a lot of energy and a lot of water, which is an increasingly precious resource in our overheating world. But there’s also the well-known mining of rare and precious metals which are needed in our shiny digital gadgets, namely smartphones.

So ‘collapse’ has a double meaning, referring to both the collapse and degradation of quality in an AI-infested digital world, and also the environmental collapse and degradation required by our digital technologies.

As it happens there’s also a double meaning to the word ‘mining’. In the digital world, data mining refers to the process of extracting information from vast datasets (like the whole internet); but ‘mining’ also has its older meaning of referring to digging up stuff under the ground, namely the rare minerals and metals required for this technology, such as lithium.

Ditto ‘extraction’: data extraction refers, fairly obviously, to AI’s mining of the internet’s data resources, and has obviously been adapted or copied from the older real-world term which describes the extraction of actual mineral wealth…

One wall label explains that one particular form of mining exposes buried sulphides which oxidise a bright orange on contact with air, and is often washed by the water involved in mining operations into streams and rivers and lakes, creating large toxic orange swamps, obviously killing all forms of life. These toxic orange waste dumps dominate the palette of the exhibition.

Model collapse summary

To summarise, then: ‘model collapse’ is a technical term referring to the degradation of AI information, which also echoes the physical degradation of the natural environment caused by the real-world requirements of supporting the digital realm.

Model collapse depicted in art

So what about the art? Well it comes in roughly two forms: there are relatively flat images hung on walls, and then there are a couple of big installations set back from the viewer with space in front covered in mining detritus etc. The biggest one, with huge, digitally fragmented images of orange mudpools at the back and industrial scraps and sacking scattered around in the foreground, kind of speaks for itself.

But something more complex is going on with many of her images. Basically she uses digital feedback to distort, degrade and fragment the original imagery. Grasp this simple principle and you understand most of what’s going on.

Also, this being V3, it refers back to the earlier versions, V1 and V2, so here’s a brief recap.

V1. Content Aware, 24 to 27 October 2024, Brighton

Installation view of V1: Content Aware (Photoworks Weekender, Brighton, October 2024)

V1 was staged in Brighton in a shipping container, the kind used in their tens of thousands to move goods around the world. these standardised objects bear coded numbers so are part of a digital system. they criss-cross the oceans above the deep sea cables which carry all our digital data. And, seen from above and at a distance, they resemble the pixels which digital images are made out of. Hammond’s images play with all these intersections and ambiguities. So it was a kind of the investigation of the global infrastructure that supports the digital economy,

‘Content Aware’ is also the name of an image editing tool. Hammond likes these puns or multiple meanings.

The installation included cameras which recorded visitors movements and interactions.

V2. Rigged, 13 March to 15 June 2025, Derby

Installation view of V2: Rigged (QUAD Gallery, FORMAT festival, Derby, March 2025)

Rigged is another pun in the sense that a rig can refer to the enormous structures which drill for oil land gas at sea. But it’s also the term for the structures which hold cameras in a studio setting. there’s also a connotation of the game being ‘rigged’ because Hammond used images of visitors to V1 and fed them through AI algorithms to generate ‘mean’ or ‘average’ images of humans. As you might expect, these didn’t come out too well.

V3. Model Collapse gallery

So what does it all look like?

Installations

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Installation consisting of a massive photo of open cast mining, surrounded by detailed photos, all presented at the back of a kind of sandbox of industrial detritus.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery © Felicity Hammond

On the wall

Shards and fragments, visual representations of the fragmented outputs of AI and the environmental collapse involved in digital technology.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

On a screen made up of 80 or so imperfect mirrors, further muddied by white smearing, are hung four images which were probably originally fairly straightforward self-portraits taken against Hammond’s emblematic green and orange designs, but have been distorted to represent AI degradation.

Installation view of V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery (photo by the author)

Portrait of the artist, through an AI glass, distortedly

Close-up of one of those four self-portraits showing how AI mostly captures the details of the original but with inexplicable ‘hallucinations’ and distortions.

V3 Model Collapse by Felicity Hammond @ the Photographers’ Gallery © Felicity Hammond

The video

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by Simon on August 17, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography
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Posted by Simon on August 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/17/felicity-hammond-v3-model-collapse-the-photographers-gallery/

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican

Big and beautiful

This is a great exhibition, a huge and dazzling collection of contemporary fabric art from around the world, works large and small, incorporating a wide variety of techniques, bringing together images and traditions and colour palettes, stories and ideas from around the world.

Blood in the Grass, 1966 by Hannah Ryggen © Hannah Ryggen / DACS 2023. Photo by Kode / Dag Fosse

It brings together just over 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners. These include well-known names such as Faith Ringgold, Tracey Emin, Cecilia Vicuña, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Yinka Shonibare, alongside many less well-known figures. And it covers a very wide range of media, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.

Textile as a medium

Textiles play an extraordinarily wide variety of roles in our everyday lives. They cover and protect us, engage our senses, trigger our memories, indicate our gender, display our beliefs. We are wrapped in cloth when we’re born and shrouded in it when we die and every day in between will be wearing some kind of fabric. I just towelled myself down after a shower, then slipped on some comfortable fleece trousers and a t-shirt, am sitting on a cotton-cushioned chair, later tonight will slip between a white cotton sheet and a patterned duvet cover. Fabrics are everywhere in our lives.

Exhibition aims

But Barbican exhibitions are never just about beautiful objects, they are always polemical and political, they’re always making a point. This one has two aims:

1) One is to challenge and question the way artistic work in fabrics has always played second fiddle to the fine arts i.e. painting and traditional sculpture, always been looked down on, often demeaningly referred to as ‘women’s work’, or slighted for having such close association with domestic and artisan production.

2) The second aim is very strongly political: every one of the artists has been chosen for the way they use textiles, fibre and thread with political goals – to challenge oppressive power structures, to commemorate the victims of state power and historical wrongs, to stand up for the weak and oppressed, to act as rallying cries or symbols of resistance to power.

The exhibition aims:

to shine a light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, harnessing the medium to ask charged questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?

to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival.

And:

From intimate hand-crafted pieces to monumental sculptural installations, the works [gathered here] offer narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion alongside stories of resilience, love and hope.

‘Hard-luck stories’

What this means in practise is that a lot of the works on display, no matter how beautiful or appealing at first glance, turn out to have harrowing and shocking inspirations or subject matter. For some reason I’ve been listening to the old Bob Dylan song, Black Diamond Bay. In the last verse the narrator cynically laments that:

Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear.

Well, that perfectly describes the exhibits here. All of them have darker sides, and you need quite a strong stomach to cope with some of the stories you read about.

For example, the very first room contains a big bold quilt by Tracey Emin. This recalls her famous quilted tent, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’, and I immediately liked it because of the punk associations of the Union Jack. It also made me think of my daughter, a classic ‘school refuser’ who might well have said, with the artist, ‘No you listen – I’m not late – you’re lucky!’ All of which made me smile.

NO CHANCE (What a Year) 1999 by Tracey Emin © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2022, courtesy White Cube Photo by Stephen White

But then I read the wall label and discovered that this hand-stitched appliqué blanket expresses Emin’s feelings as a 13-year-old girl in 1977, the year a man raped her. Ah. Oh. Not so funny or entertaining now, is it? Now you understand the way the work’s sweary, confrontational text, cut out in felt and hand-stitched onto fabric, really comes from a place of great hurt and anger and vulnerability. God. Upsetting.

In a similar vein, I turned a corner into one of the upper gallery’s 12 alcoves and was immediately struck and attracted by the rich deep scarlet colouring of this wonderful piece of fabric, made all the more vibrant by the way it’s set against the jet-black background.

Installation view of ‘Luingamla Kashan’ by Zamthingla Ruivah (1990 to the present). Photo by the author

Until I read the wall label:

In 1986 a young woman in Northern India named Luingamla, a friend of the artist, was murdered by army officers who attempted to rape her. The officers walked free due to a law, a remnant of British colonial rule, that meant that armed forces were immune from being tried in civil courts. Student groups and the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Association) rallied to bring a case before the courts. They won the case in 1990, four years after her murder. Ruivah wove this keshan — a woollen sarong worn by men and women in the Naga Hills of Manipur, northeast India — to commemorate Luingamla’s path to justice. Since then, the design has been passed down through Naga communities across the region, with more than 6,000 women having produced over 15,000 of them. They have become a symbol of solidarity with the Naga resistance movement and the fight against state violence towards women.

Probably ‘hard luck story’ isn’t the correct term, but see what I mean? Every single artifact here has an upsetting or problematic inspiration or purpose.

Take the image I opened this review with, ‘Blood in the Grass’ by Hannah Ryggen. This turns out, on investigation, to be a visual depiction of the US war in Vietnam. Once you read the wall label you learn that the face at the top right is a stylised portrait of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over the disastrous escalation of the war in the late 1960s. And that the green rectangles represent the lush fields of Vietnam while the grid of red lines represents the blood shed by the massacred Vietnamese. Ah.

Or take this massive, wall-sized piece by Tau Lewis, ‘‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ which, at first sight, looks like lots of sea creatures frolicking against a patchwork of blue fabrics representing the ocean, a fairly harmless work you might find hanging in a sixth-form art block.

‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ by Tau Lewis (2019) © Tau Lewis, courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

But in fact:

This patchwork quilt in part pays homage to the enslaved women and children who lost their lives during the Middle Passage (the enforced transport of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). Reimagining them as sea creatures, Lewis transforms the trauma that lies in underwater territories into spaces of regeneration and emancipation.

There’s a lot about the historical crime of the slave trade, which feeds through into more up-to-date crimes against Black people and invocations of the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth’ by Teresa Margolles (2015) Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich/ Paris

Apparently, artist Teresa Margolles often uses material residues from murder sites in her art. This patchwork tapestry was laid on the ground at the site in New York where Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, was placed in an illegal chokehold and killed by New York police.

It’s one of a pair of works by Margolles which are laid flat on lightboxes like the bodies of the murdered placed on autopsy tables. The works were made collaboratively with embroiderers who were close to the victims. Members of the Harlem Needle Arts cultural arts institute made the work commemorating Garner’s death, a patchwork which also honours other African American victims of police brutality.

So, to recap: this is very far indeed from being a collection of pretty textiles. Every work tells a story and many of the stories are harrowing and upsetting.

Favourites

Here are some of the works I liked most, based more on their actual appearance and the impact they made on me than the righteousness of the issues they address. I add the curators’ explanations in italics.

‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018)

Installation view of ‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018) Photo by the author

In TIKAR/MEJA, images of tables are woven into the mats through the weft and warp of colourful strips of pandan leaves, using the same techniques Yee’s ancestors used for centuries. The table serves as a symbol for the imposition of a patriarchal and colonial worldview onto a population, while the mat signifies a more democratic and mutual power, imbued with ancestral knowledge and traditions. This display shows twelve works from a series of sixty that can be displayed in different configurations.

‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019)

Installation view of ‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019) Photo by the author

‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’ This passage from the Bible inspired the title of Zapata’s first sprawling ‘shag’ sculpture. Its structure references the architecture of the Nazca ceremonial site Cahuachi, where a huge woven cloth was excavated in 1952. She transforms the ruin into a landscape of vibrant latch-hooked threads, refusing any risk that this ancestral site might be lost to time. The undulating form subverts the notion of the rug as floor-based: Indigenous communities in Peru only began using textiles on the floor after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

Incidentally, the Zapata work raised a basic question about the exhibition which is that I really, really wanted to reach out, touch, stroke and run my hands over lots and lots of the works here. The curators make it worse by repeatedly emphasising how warm and intimate and comforting so many different types of fabric are – only to place around every single one of them, loud alarms which are triggered if you step or even put your hand beyond the black bars on the floor. Frustrating.

As usual the show is spread over the Barbican’s two floors. The 12 or so upstairs rooms have some great pieces, but the most impressive space is the big room downstairs, which contains the Zapata piece, a typical Abakan by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose major retrospective at Tate Modern I reviewed not so long ago.

Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012)

It also contains maybe the single most striking work in the show, a forest of slender, brightly coloured fabrics suspended from the ceiling and billowing gently as people walked past them, created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña.

Installation view of ‘Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012) photo by the author

The idea of hanging fabrics is familiar to anyone who caught Vicuña’s recent installation at Tate Modern. According to the curators:

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom. This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues found in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings.

Igshaan Adams

Mind you, the upstairs has a very impressive room, probably the best single space, filled with works by Igshaan Adams. It’s an installation consisting of several works. From the ceiling hang ‘prayer clouds’ gassy feeling conglomerate structures made from gold and silver link chain, copper , gold and silver wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint. Quite a mix!

Installation view of the Igshaan Adams room. Photo by the author

Through the ‘foggy’ effect of these metal imbroglios you see a more conventional rectangular work hanging on the wall. This is ‘Heideveld’ (2021) made of wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine. It was worth going right up close to the surface of this to see the extraordinary range of material which have been used and the awesome amount of work it must have taken.

Close-up view of ‘Heideveld’ by Igshaan Adams (2021) Photo by the author

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so-called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually.’

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993)

Although the works the curators have chosen all too often commemorate murder, oppression, racism, sexism, misogyny and so on, there are occasional moments of happiness, like the sun breaking through the clouds on a gloomy winter’s day. One such piece is ‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks.

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993) © Sheila Hicks, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023, courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

In ‘Family Treasures’, Hicks draws upon the intimacy of textile: we all wear it, we invest it with feelings and it is literally the texture of our everyday lives. While in Amsterdam in 1993, she asked close friends and family members to surrender their most beloved items of clothing, which she wrapped in colourful yarn and thread. Each tightly-wound bundle is a reminder of what we hold dear.

Hicks is a leading member of the fibre arts movement in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 70s, in which mostly women artists experimented with fibre and thread as a legitimate medium for art. Hicks’ work is often sculptural, playful and harnesses a variety of scales — from the small and intimate to the monumental — challenging the idea that textiles are flat, decorative and wall-based. Her work has been motivated by the acknowledgement that fibre permeates peoples’ lives. She has commented: ‘you can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.’

Sweet idea, huh? And very valid point that fabric art needn’t be flat and wall-based, as many, many of the works here amply demonstrate.

Hammock by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003)

‘Hammock’ (part of ‘Four Hammocks’) by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003) Courtesy of Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington DC. Photo by Chi Lam

‘Hammock’ was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.

Conclusion

I’ve covered 11 of the 50 exhibitors. That leaves 39 more for you to discover in this big, colourful, wonderful but – be warned – sometimes upsetting and challenging show. If it sets out to prove that work in fabric can be every bit as interesting as more traditional ‘fine art’, then it triumphantly succeeds. And if it wishes to show that this kind of work also lends itself to collaborative, community-based responses to brutality, abuse of power and exploitation, then it also succeeds.

Lastly, I haven’t devoted enough time to considering the actual techniques of quilting, sewing, knitting, collaging and assembling which are on display throughout the show. That’s because I’m not really qualified to do so, but the friend I went with hardly read any of the labels (thus sparing herself quite a lot of distress) and instead was riveted by the variety and inventiveness of technical skills on display.

I haven’t really dwelt enough on the artistry, skill and inventiveness which has gone into so many of these pieces. It’s worth visiting for anyone interested in fabric, quilting, sewing, decorating and texture-based art for that reason alone. Quite apart from the loud blare of the political stories and issues, here is a collection of quietly fastidious and intricate artistry.

Detail from ‘Dylegued (Entierro)’ by Teresa Margolles (2013) Photo by the author

Participating artists

  • Pacita Abad (The Philippines/USA)
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland)
  • Igshaan Adams (South Africa)
  • Ghada Amer (Egypt/France)
  • Arpilleristas (Chile)
  • Mercedes Azpilicueta (Argentina)
  • Yto Barrada (Morocco)
  • Kevin Beasley (USA)
  • Sanford Biggers (USA)
  • Louise Bourgeois (France / USA)
  • Diedrick Brackens (USA)
  • Jagoda Buić (Croatia)
  • Margarita Cabrera (Mexico / USA)
  • Feliciano Centurión (Paraguay)
  • Judy Chicago (USA)
  • Myrlande Constant (Haiti)
  • Cian Dayrit (The Philippines)
  • Tracey Emin (UK)
  • Jeffrey Gibson (USA)
  • Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (The Netherlands / Panama and The Netherlands / Yugoslavia)
  • Harmony Hammond (USA)
  • Sheila Hicks (USA)
  • Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa)
  • Yee I-Lann (Malaysia)
  • Kimsooja (South Korea)
  • Acaye Kerunen (Uganda)
  • José Leonilson (Brazil)
  • Tau Lewis (Canada)
  • Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana)
  • Teresa Margolles (Mexico)
  • Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe)
  • Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Poland)
  • Mrinalini Mukherjee (India)
  • Violeta Parra (Chile)
  • Solange Pessoa (Brazil)
  • Loretta Pettway (Gee’s Bend) (USA)
  • Antonio Pichillá (Guatemala)
  • Faith Ringgold (USA)
  • LJ Roberts (USA)
  • Zamthingla Ruivah (India)
  • Hannah Ryggen (Norway)
  • Tschabalala Self (USA)
  • Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (UK)
  • Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon)
  • Angela Su (Hong Kong)
  • Lenore Tawney (USA)
  • T. Vinoja (Sri Lanka)
  • Cecilia Vicuña (Chile)
  • Billie Zangewa (Malawi / South Africa)
  • Sarah Zapata (Peru / USA)

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by Simon on February 18, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on February 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/unravel-the-power-and-politics-of-textiles-in-art-the-barbican/

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons @ the Hayward Gallery

This is a great exhibition. You should definitely go. Fun, spooky, scarey, immersive, yet strangely liberating and uplifting. Completely different from the hard study required at something like the Tate Modern Cezanne blockbuster where you have to pay attention, read and study. Here you walk about and through and under and experience your own sensations, moods and thoughts.

Mike Nelson

British artist Mike Nelson specialises in big installations, room-sized installations, huge installations, assembled from industrial junk and derelict objects, knackered old tyres, abandoned doors, auctioned-off industrial equipment, bric-a-brac salvaged from junkyards, abandoned buildings, car boot sales and much more.

All this stuff and more is assembled into strange and eerie combinations and installations, some you look at, but some you can actually enter and wander through, all of them designed to tease and nag at the corner of your mind, with their eerie sense of abandoned building sites, derelict workshops, underground bars, rough plywood hoardings, half-plastered rooms.

I reviewed an installation of some of these works at Tate Britain back in 2019. There I go into some detail about the autobiographical reasons why I like modern art made from industrial junk, namely the number of labouring jobs I did when I was a teenager and young man, and so how powerfully evocative I find old industrial machinery, equipment, tools and especially tyres – car tyres, lorry tyres, their smell and feel and the black rubber marks they leave on your skin and clothes were a big part of my boyhood.

Anyway. Let’s consider some of the key works in this exhibition:

I, Imposter (2011)

A really big room filled with wide apart shelves crammed with all kinds of bulky non-descript industrial products, miscellaneous furniture and fixtures, with big palettes and wooden sheets leaning up against the wall. Atmosphere of a derelict warehouse. BUT the key fact: all illuminated by a low level but intense scarlet light. Not daylight or fluorescent light, but blood-red, deep dread, womb-red luminence. Abandoned, eerie, spooky. Straightaway taking you to another place, into the realm of horror movies or intense science fiction.

Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

The Deliverance and the Patience (2001)

Next we move onto a big gallery space in which has been created out of wood a maze of narrow corridors, unpainted, with damaged, derelict half-built walls – a zigzag of short passages with wooden doors of different styles, presumably picked up from skips across London, leading into claustrophobically small, low-ceiling walls, some of which have further doors leading you on into the maze, others don’t so you exit the way you entered. The process of navigating this space is surprisingly unsettling and, at one point, I felt a surge of the panic I get when trapped in really small, confined spaces, like the real panic I experienced when I once went potholing with my son (and a guide).

Typical corridor scene inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Anyway, each of the ‘rooms’ – barely more than cubicles – are like tiny stage sets: one is a cramped bar with a photo-mirror of Elvis on the wall; another has old oil paintings of sailing ships and some model ships on the bar along with ‘Do not spit’ signs in English and Chines. Another is a sort of travel agents’, with a narrow counter and ancient posters of old-style air stewardesses standing in front of passenger jets. Another contains a small green baize table on which is a miniature roulette wheel, some tarot cards, and on the wall behind a communist-era Chinese poster of young model communist striding into the brave future.

The pokey little ‘travel agency’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

As far as I can tell these don’t ‘mean’ anything. They are meant to be experiences, of eeriness and spookiness. A world of other times and lives which have all been abandoned. Wreckage. Remains. Detritus. As in a thousand and one science fiction movies where the entire human race is whisked away leaving meals half eaten and cigarettes still smouldering, for the dazed survivors to blunder amidst.

The ‘gambling den’ inside The Deliverance and The Patience by Mike Nelson (2001) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Triple Bluff Canyon (2004)

If all this cramped interiority is getting a bit claustrophobic, you then go up the steps to the upper galleries, which are dominated by one huge installation titled ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’.

Installation view of Triple Bluff Canyon (the woodshed) by Mike Nelson (2004) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

First off this is a wonderful work, combining everything I love in modern art: big, imaginative, made of industrial detritus, a profound comment on modern society at the same time as being funny, a kind of art joke. And, reading the wall label, you realise there’s more to it than meets the eye, in fact three distinct elements:

First off, it’s a homage to an American artist named Robert Smithson who, in 1970, half buried a woodshack in 20 tonnes of earth. Nelson has recreated the basic idea, but replaced earth with sand, maybe in reference to the Gulf War and the West’s general inability to stop meddling in Arab countries.

Second, the tyres. From what I could make out, these are part of a separate series of works which are simply collections of wrecked, damaged and abandoned tyres which can be found alongside motorways and highways around the world. Each little collection is simply titled after the road where Nelson found them. And so these tyres are titled ‘M25’.

Third, you see the white rectangle on the right of the photo, well that’s actually a doorway into a corridor which curves round into the woodshed itself which has been turned, by being half-buried, into a grim, spooky bunker. First of all the corridor is only 10 yards or so long but curves quite steeply, so that I was lucky to enjoy quite a cinematic moment; because I’d got as far as the door into the bunker when I heard footsteps behind me. A woman with very loud heels had entered the curved corridor and was walking very slowly, with a very loud clack of each footstep, behind me, following me, but because of the steep curve I couldn’t see her. Rather than push the door and go into the bunker I waited and it turned into a surprisingly tense, eerie couple of seconds as I waited for my mysterious pursuer to appear.

The Uncanny

I’ve been rereading Freud. Freud wrote an essay on The Uncanny. My understanding is that we experience ‘the uncanny’ when something we perceive reminds us of, evokes and stirs, childhood feelings and emotions which themselves are concealing deeper ‘truths’ or drives or instinctive wishes, which we have successfully repressed. The uncanny is the dread we feel in situations in which our childish fantasies and fears appear more real and true than our adult knowledge and perspective.

This description applies 100% to the feeling I had after getting lost in half a dozen cramped, subterranean rooms in The Deliverance and the Patience, and then his uncanny moment inside ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’

Eventually she came into sight and wasn’t actually the science fiction-cyborg-horror monster my unconscious was momentarily panicking about, but a regular gallery goer – so I held the door into the bunker open and we both went inside. Into another womb-like cave, entirely lit by blood-red lighting.

Installation view of I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The wall label tells us that this interior is a separate work from Triple Bluff. This is ‘I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom)’ which makes explicit reference to its nature as a mock-up of a photographer’s darkroom. Except it doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like a cave, an underground bunker. The equipment on the bench doesn’t look like a professional photographer’s but is another collection of junk and detritus, and what’s the big boiler dominating the far end of the room? It feels like a room in a hobbit house late at night. More doors lead onto a half-wrecked room which is open to the sand pouring in from the main installation, again with a strong feeling of dereliction and abandonment, as in thousands of science fiction movies.

View from inside the sand bunker looking out – I, IMPOSTOR (the darkroom) by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

Absence

When I was a literature student ‘absence’ was an important concept in critical theory. I think I read about it in the work of French philosopher Pierre Macherey. Put very simply, what is absent from a work can sometimes tell you more than what is present. But you don’t have to dig that deeply to realise that what all these installations have in common is the absence of people.

This is emphasised by the way so many of them are types of locations which ought to be populated, such as the bars and gambling den and travel agents of ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’, the hobbit-bunker of I, IMPOSTOR, or the eerily empty red warehouse at the start. That’s why I’ve mentioned several times the powerfully eerie sense of abandonment and loss that pervades the exhibition.

(I was reminded me of the phrase Homo absconditus which curators coined for an exhibition of painting by Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg.)

Asset Strippers

Moving along the upper floor we come to another large room containing five items from the series Nelson calls ‘Asset Strippers’. I’ll quote my review of Asset Strippers’ when I saw it at Tate Britain.

There are old weaving machines, heavy-duty metal cabinets, two huge old-fashioned weighing scales, the threshing wheels of a tractor attachment, the huge rubber tracks from a mechanical digger. Nelson has collected knitting machines from textile factories like the ones he grew up around in the East Midlands, woodwork stripped from a former army barracks, graffitied steel awnings once used to secure a condemned housing estate, doors from an NHS hospital, and much, much more. It is a rag and bone yard, a paradise of defunct paraphernalia artfully arranged so that each piece creates a space around itself, defines its space, creates a psychic zone of defunct power.

Installation view of ‘Asset Strippers’ by Mike Nelson (2011) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by Matt Greenwood. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery

In my review of the Tate Britain display I tackle Nelson’s intended aim of commenting on the destruction of British industrial manufacturing and the trope of cliché that tells us we live in a post-industrial society. For some reason, at some point, I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. I know the title refers to the kinds of financial companies which buy up businesses not to run them at a profit but to gut them of all their assets and sell on the shell, and Nelson is implying this modus operandi can be applied widely across British society in the neo-liberal era i.e. the last 40 years.

But this time round I was struck by the word ‘strippers’. As in strippers in a strip club. And for a while I enjoyed perceiving each of these carefully assembled artefacts as Dada joke reworkings of the human figure, using abandoned industrial machinery.

The exhibition then takes you back down to the ground level where there are two more enormous works:

Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster

Apparently this is one of a series of such works which are designed to parody the notion of an artist’s studio as ‘a place for authentic production’. As a thing what’s noticeable is the heavy industrial vibe of the big wooden hoardings but most of all of the threatening thick-wire mesh matrix. Only when you look closely do you realise that the grey balls suspended throughout it are in fact grey clay models of human heads. As far as I could tell, all the ones I saw looked like the heads of Black people and all of them are hung upside down. Why?

Installation view of Studio Apparatus for Kunsthalle Munster – A Thematic Instalment Observing the Calendrical Celebration of its Inception: Introduction; towards a linear understanding of notoriety, power and their interconnectednessl future objecs (misspelt); mysterious island by Mike Nelson (2014) Photo: Matt Greenwood. Courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The Amnesiacs

Up the ramp behind this is a similar work, also using big industrial wood framing but much finer wire mesh to create what look like a series of rabbit hutches. These contain objects created from the standard sources to illustrate a fictional gang Nelson has created and which he calls The Amnesiacs. This little conceit combines a wistful yearning of ‘cool’ imagery from American culture (biker gangs from ‘The Wild Ones’ onwards) with Nelson’s characteristic feel for dereliction and decay.

Installation view of The Amnesiacs by Mike Nelson (1996-ongoing) at the Hayward Gallery. Photo by the author

I particularly liked the ‘motorbike’ which is actually constructed, in a semi-Dalì kind of way, from two old tyres, two walking sticks for the front wheel prongs, antlers for handlebars, three yellow rubber rings supporting the antlers, which themselves rest on an orange helmet standing in for the petrol tank, with the main body of the ‘bike’ being a packing case covered in a fleece. The way that Nelson has recreated an everyday object out of readymade material adds support to my idea that the asset strippers might in fact be sly, Dada-joke sculptures of the human body…

Thoughts

Spooky, surreal, claustrophobic, anxiety-provoking, wonderfully imaginative, beautiful, thoughtful, silly, funny, surreal and a bit disturbing. it only took me 45 minutes or so to go round the entire exhibition but it was a very intense 45 minutes, and I staggered out of the gallery feeling like I’d watched half a dozen different movies and read or read a bunch of upsetting and disturbing science fiction short stories. Go experience it for yourself.

As in life: some doors open, some do not. You nly find out when you try them.

Related links

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

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by Simon on March 13, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 13, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/03/13/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons-the-hayward-gallery/

Space Shifters @ the Hayward Gallery

I went to see Space Shifters during half-term so the exhibition was packed with mums, dads and lots of toddlers running round, whooping in amazement, smiling, poking their tongues out and pulling funny faces. Why? Because this is an extremely open, light, attractive and interactive exhibition of examples of modern art which play with space and perception.

Installation view of WeltenLinie (2017) by Alicja Kwade © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Installation view of WeltenLinie (2017) by Alicja Kwade © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Take WeltenLinie (2017) by Alicja Kwade, a set of black frames big enough to walk through, some of which contain mirrors, most of which do not, with abstract sculptures or blocks of material dotted among them. According to the free pamphlet given to every visitor, Kwade’s

sculptural installations, objects and films illustrate or attempt to give material form to abstract questions and scientific principles. Addressing the relationship between reality and illusion, they ask us to think about what we know and how we know it.

To be honest, I don’t think ‘they ask us to think about what we know and what we don’t know at all’. I found it much more fun watching kids tentatively exploring to see if the next frame was a mirror or a blank space, before stepping through the blanks, posing in front of the mirrors and pulling silly faces, and running round the back and hiding.

This is a brilliant exhibition to bring kids to.

Installation view of Space Shifters

Installation view of Space Shifters

Space Shifters features works by 20 ‘leading international artists’ that ‘alter or disrupt the visitor’s sense of space’. In case you’re wondering, these artists are:

  • Leonor Antunes
  • Larry Bell
  • Fred Eversley
  • Felix Gonzalez-Torres
  • Jeppe Hein
  • Roni Horn
  • Robert Irwin
  • Ann Veronica Janssens
  • Anish Kapoor
  • Yayoi Kusama
  • Alicja Kwade
  • John McCracken
  • Josiah McElheny
  • Helen Pashgian
  • Charlotte Posenenske
  • Fred Sandback
  • Monika Sosnowska
  • Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
  • De Wain Valentine
  • Richard Wilson

At one point I heard a little boy running round an exhibit shouting ‘mirrors, mirrors, mirrors’ and there are, indeed a lot of mirrors – distorting mirrors, see-through mirrors, polished balls which are, in effect, mirrors.

For example there’s a set of free-standing mirrors which look like the type you get on old-fashioned wardrobes, stuck onto round wooden frames. It turns out that these are costumes – rather heavy costumes – designed to be worn by performers, who walk slowly along straight lines indicated on the gallery floor. Here is a very poor photo of just such a performer,wearing the mirrors, walking the line.

Abstract Bodies by Josiah McElheny

Abstract Bodies by Josiah McElheny. Photo by the author

Down on the ground floor is an entire room devoted to the work Narcissus Garden by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. This consists of stainless steel balls arranged in an organic pattern a little like the shore of a lake, inviting you to wander into the ‘inlets’, to view the balls from different perspectives or to settle down amid the sea of reflections, like this family was doing.

Installation view of Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama

Installation view of Narcissus Garden by Yayoi Kusama

In the first gallery there are beanbags supplied so you can lie back and watch two big mirrors shaped into a sort of butterfly wing, which is attached high up on the wall and slowly rotates. From the beanbags you are given a slowly moving panoramic reflection of the gallery interior and everyone in it.

Installation view of 360° Illusion V (2018) by Jeppe Hein © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Installation view of 360° Illusion V (2018) by Jeppe Hein © the artist. Note the bead curtains on the upper right. Photo by Mark Blower

Some of these works are old – the first version of the Narcissus Garden dates back to 1966. Others have been created specially for this exhibition. What’s interesting is that you can’t tell the difference. In many key ways ‘modern’ art hasn’t really developed much since the extraordinary breakthroughs of the 1960s.

Two of the most striking mirror-based artworks are upstairs. One can be seen through windows, situated on one of the terraces or ‘sculpture courts’ outside the gallery. It is Sky Mirror, Blue by Anish Kapoor who made it in 2016. This big blue concave mirror reflects a section of the sky and, as you watch, you can see England’s distinctive clouds moving slowly across it. Quite restful and entrancing.

Sky Mirror, Blue (2016) by Anish Kapoor. Photo by the author

Sky Mirror, Blue (2016) by Anish Kapoor. Photo by the author

Probably the most stunning exhibit, and the only one which truly qualifies as a profoundly disorientating experience, is 20:50 by Richard Wilson, which was premiered as long ago as 1987.

Into one entire room of the gallery, carefully lined and sealed, have been poured thousands of litres of recycled oil which rise right up till the surface is exactly flush with the v-shaped walkway which visitors can go along.

As you walk ‘out’ into this gangway, the ‘lake’ of completely flat, completely placid oil, works as a room-sized mirror and perfectly reflects everything above it, the walls and ceiling, as well as the views out the window. It is a genuinely disorientating and wonderful experience – which is why a queue forms for it as soon as the gallery opens (at 11am, by the way).

Installation view of 20:50 by Richard Wilson (1987) at Space Shifters © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

Installation view of 20:50 by Richard Wilson (1987) at Space Shifters © the artist. Photo by Mark Blower

It’s not all mirrors, though. In several rooms whole areas had been partitioned off by heavy metal bead curtains, downstairs a set made of lead grey metal, upstairs a lighter set painted golden.

Kids loved running back and forwards through these. I’m amazed they hadn’t been pulled off their hangings.

There were a number of rather more subtle sculptures, experimenting with tall vertical and spindly feel, or a big circular purple blob which looked like an enormous half-melted candle, the central crater, rather like 20:50, brimful of fluid.

Another striking piece was Handrail by Monika Sosnowska (2016). There is, apparently, an order to the show: you are meant to go round the first room, lie on the beanbags to admire 360° Illusion V, then progress up the ramp and through the lead curtains into the space containing WeltenLinie and other works, before going up the stairs to the upper floor.

As you do so, you may or may not notice that the standard black handrail lining the staircase is, at some point, taken over by a lithe red handrail which twists around it like a snake and then, as you emerge into the large upstairs gallery, you discover that the red handrail suddenly goes mad and runs all over an entire wall in a crazy scrawl.

Handrail (2016) by Monika Sosnowska © the artist. Photo by the author

Handrail (2016) by Monika Sosnowska © the artist. Photo by the author

But I think my favourite work – or the one which made me smile and I remember best – is the very modest work by Fred Sandback. Born in 1945, Sandback began making minimalist sculptures out of elastic cord and wire back in the 1960s. In the exhibition guide Sandback explains that he got frustrated with sculpture which got ‘bogged down in its own materiality’, so he set out to make something ‘without an inside’ that could exist on an equal footing with the viewer.

The idea was to have the work right there along with everything else in the world, not up on a spatial pedestal.

For decades he’s simply been using off-the-shelf acrylic yarn to create simple shapes and spaces. And so his piece in this exhibition consists of one string of red yarn pinned out to form a triangle, one side across one wall, changing angle where the wall joins the next, both lines extending down to the floor where the third side of the triangle runs across the floor.

Untitled by Fred Sandback

Untitled by Fred Sandback

So minimal it’s almost not there – which is exactly what I like about it. In a world full of ever-escalating clamour and rage, Sandback ‘performs choreographies without words or scripts’. It’s a matter of:

conjuring up a form and then getting comfortable with it and seeing where it may take you.

As I stood enjoying it, several other visitors came up and stepped over the barely visible red line on the floor ‘into’ the art work – and the gallery assistant had to ask each of them to please step back out of it because if they stepped ‘into’ it they destroyed its Zen-like purity. A totally relaxed, open and permissive art work which – however – requires strict policing!

This is a great show, mind-opening, eye-widening, light and airy, and hugely enjoyable. Bring the kids. If you don’t have any, borrow some. They’ll love it, and you’ll love watching their reactions.

The promotional video

Related links

  • Space Shifters continues at the Hayward Gallery until 6 January 2019

Other Hayward Gallery reviews

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by Simon on October 24, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on October 24, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/space-shifters-the-hayward-gallery/