A couple of exhibitions have stuck out recently. The first was the group show Trauma at GV Art. It took a psychological and a physical viewpoint – I have never really given time to the physical side. Like the thinking of the gallery it was curated with science and art in mind. I loved Luke Jerram’s Glass Microbiology; glass representations of the structures of diseases such as HIV and Malaria. There was something almost tacky or crude within their symmetry and the chosen material. It was tempting to touch and smear the glass. Static and un-harmful they were strong and beautiful forms.
The second exhibition was Nude by Eva Caridi at Ambika P3. I haven’t been there before, amazing huge (14,000 sq ft) hidden space, opposite Madame Tussauds (never been there either) it was once an underground hangar. In the main hangar you look down on a dark labyrinth made of iron in this gigantic industrial space. Walking through it was disorientating and I felt the beginnings of panic (in fairness there was a notice warning against going in if you were claustrophobic or such like). It did or didn’t help (depending on what way that you look at it) that there weren’t any other visitors. In the centre of the labyrinth was a video projection. The video was of three female figures representing one woman at three stages of her life. They wandered through a crumbling and dilapidated building, sometimes meeting. It was accompanied by an eerie and broken dialogue. The following is taken from the exhibition literature by the curator Francesca Nannini:
The merging of past, present and future is reinforced by the three ages of life reverberating through the installation as we walk inside it, a place where we are the containers of both our child and adult’s feelings. During the course of our life we tend to lose connections with the child apart of ourselves and memories are locked in the secret alleys of our soul: now they resurface and float into this dilation of our time.
And accompanying text from Andrea Zizzari a philosopher and psychoanalyst:
Man, deprived of his peculiar desire to recognize himself, is often identified with completely anonymous needs and, as soon as an object reveals its imperfection, the meaning of himself fails. Limbs that are tied to one own’s own time to look for an impossible shelter now approach a speechless real, yearning for identification.
Thinking now of similar art works such as, Martin Creed’s room of balloons Work No. 200, half the air in a given space and Antony Gormley’s glass room of mist Blind Light. These are works in their own right and aren’t propping up or embellishing another. Actually there are lots of similarities between Eva Caridi’s and Antony Gormley’s practices. The setup pushed for a sensational experience and I was in a receptive mood. Although I did like the labyrinth within the space, and the way it mirrored the concept of the video, I’m not sure it was needed.
