Home: Live > In Room
Whitechapel Gallery
13.10.2020
Today I visited the Whitechapel Gallery in London and saw “Home: Live > In Room”, an exhibition curated by the Whitechapel Gallery’s Youth Forum, Duchamp & Sons, comprising a selection of artworks from the Hiscox Collection.
A coherent yet miscellaneous batch, the works filling the two small exhibition rooms all undoubtedly evoked the living space but also the passing of time, hovering over poetic and rougher approaches. Decadent living rooms, such as Richard Billingham’s, months passing in Lisa Oppenheim’s, "Calendar" (2013), the ultimate fleeting on Peter Doig’s, "Canoe – Island" (2000), and at last its failure, as depicted in Edward Burtynsky’s, "Shipbreaking #4 Field Proof, Chittagong, Bangladesh" (2000). Perhaps unintended, the exhibition comes through as a narration of the dome of time, or conceivably just an average break-down. We’ve all been there.
In my eyes the most remarkable, “Political Map of Phantom Islands”, a work by Agnieszka Kurant (1978, Łódź, Poland) from 2011, puts together an assortment of non-existing islands: cartographer mistakes, magical places imagined by literature or mere cover-up islands for those explorers who were too embarrassed to return home without any new land discoveries. Coming in line with a library composed only by books that exist only as a mention in other books, another brilliant conceptual piece by Kurant, this map spoke to me about island living as a metaphor for quarantining at home, in my case in 6 m2.
The best whaleman, meaning the bravest, most competent ones, are born in the islands, as I have been taught by Herman Melville, a friend who has been accompanying me for the last couple of weeks. Are there phantom whalemen living in these phantom islands, longing to take out to sea? Our own artificial hells are our homes, our phantom islands, and they have turned us into ghost whalemen, longing to sail out for vengeance. Well, call me Ishmael, for I’m borrowing that canoe.
Whitechapel Gallery
13.10.2020
Today I visited the Whitechapel Gallery in London and saw “Home: Live > In Room”, an exhibition curated by the Whitechapel Gallery’s Youth Forum, Duchamp & Sons, comprising a selection of artworks from the Hiscox Collection.
A coherent yet miscellaneous batch, the works filling the two small exhibition rooms all undoubtedly evoked the living space but also the passing of time, hovering over poetic and rougher approaches. Decadent living rooms, such as Richard Billingham’s, months passing in Lisa Oppenheim’s, "Calendar" (2013), the ultimate fleeting on Peter Doig’s, "Canoe – Island" (2000), and at last its failure, as depicted in Edward Burtynsky’s, "Shipbreaking #4 Field Proof, Chittagong, Bangladesh" (2000). Perhaps unintended, the exhibition comes through as a narration of the dome of time, or conceivably just an average break-down. We’ve all been there.
In my eyes the most remarkable, “Political Map of Phantom Islands”, a work by Agnieszka Kurant (1978, Łódź, Poland) from 2011, puts together an assortment of non-existing islands: cartographer mistakes, magical places imagined by literature or mere cover-up islands for those explorers who were too embarrassed to return home without any new land discoveries. Coming in line with a library composed only by books that exist only as a mention in other books, another brilliant conceptual piece by Kurant, this map spoke to me about island living as a metaphor for quarantining at home, in my case in 6 m2.
The best whaleman, meaning the bravest, most competent ones, are born in the islands, as I have been taught by Herman Melville, a friend who has been accompanying me for the last couple of weeks. Are there phantom whalemen living in these phantom islands, longing to take out to sea? Our own artificial hells are our homes, our phantom islands, and they have turned us into ghost whalemen, longing to sail out for vengeance. Well, call me Ishmael, for I’m borrowing that canoe.
