Audio Tour: Ryan Gander
Ryan Gander speaking about his installation[mp3 format, 1min 53]
NARRATOR: The three components here, seemingly unrelated, form an installation by Ryan Gander.
RYAN GANDER: The first one is a bale of newspapers and on top of the bale, it shows the back of a newspaper, with a crossword in it. And the crossword contains a fictional word, a word that I invented; with its own etymology, its own history. And that’s in the crossword, which makes the crossword defunct, because if you don’t know the word you can’t complete the puzzle.
The second component is a photograph of a social housing block in Hoxton, in Shoreditch, across the road from my studio. You can see that there’s a small concrete milestone, it seems a bit like a small pet’s gravestone; it’s just plain, covered slightly in moss.
NARRATOR: Gander made it from concrete that was crumbling off a building in Marseilles. It was designed by one of the innovators of Modernist architecture, Le Corbusier.
RYAN GANDER: The building in Marseilles is a starting-block for Modernism; and then a building that doesn’t really follow the principles of modernism, but mimics a faux modernist look about it.
The third component is the most monumental somehow. And these cork tiles have been up in my studio, as a pinboard which I’ve been using to research the work for this show: photographs, and photocopies and notes and writings. And through the process of developing the work, the documents have been moved around. There’s a point that I realized that moving them around didn’t do any good, because the associations between the documents were infinite. And I left it at that point and allowed the UV light in the room to bleach the cork tiles. Now I’ve removed the documents and the tiles have been jumbled up and sent to the Tate.
NARRATOR: To hear a sound file from a recent work by Gander—his own kind of audio tour-- press the green PLAY button.
Back to Audio Tour