About TH.2058
Curator Jessica Morgan on the exhibition
THE UNILEVER SERIES: DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's TH.2058 looks 50 years into the future, as the inhabitants of London take shelter in the Turbine Hall from a never-ending rain. Filled with bunk beds scattered with books, the animal forms of gargantuan sculptures, a massive LED screen playing edited extracts from science-fiction and experimental films, and piercing lights that suggest some unseen surveillance, the Turbine Hall has taken on the attributes of an epic film set.
TH.2058, however, is not simply a work of science fiction, but an exploration of some of the artistic ideas that have preoccupied Gonzalez-Foerster over the last twenty years. The notion of the shelter, for instance, is partly inspired by her sense of London as a city under attack in reality and in innumerable books and films: flooded, bombed and invaded. It can also be traced back to her series Chambres, a sequence of environments which recreated fictional or personal domestic spaces in a minimal or elliptical form. Since then, she has created other related types of space, transforming areas such as public parks into choreographed social environments that visitors experience as both viewer and participant.
The use of carefully selected quotations is central to her work, most evident here in the replicated, over-sized art works by Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Some look back to earlier Turbine Hall installations, while others – such as Calder's soaring Flamingo – relate to an expansive idea of public sculpture. The inclusion of Oldenburg and van Bruggen pays homage to their radical introduction of the blow-up, a distortion seminal to much late twentieth-century art and one taken up by the contemporary trickster Maurizio Cattelan.
The Last Film, which plays on the huge screen overlooking the Turbine Hall, similarly assembles excerpts from the experimental films of Chris Marker and Peter Watkins, and the science fiction of George Lucas and Nicolas Roeg. Scenes of shelter and archives are drawn from Richard Fleischer's Soylent Green and Alain Resnais's Toute la mémoire du monde, alongside sequences of urban expectation from Peter Weir's The Last Wave, the apocalyptic explosion of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and the dystopian vision of a world without books in François Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.
Another form of quotation is provided by the physical presence of the books distributed among the beds. Again, books have been an important element in Gonzalez-Foerster's work, most notably in her Tapis de lecture [Carpet for reading]. The titles selected here further illuminate the themes and thinking that underlie TH.2058, and include Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Jeff Noon's Vurt, Enrique Vila-Matas's El mal de Montano and Catherine Dufour's Le Goût de l'immortalité. These literary quotations are accompanied by the aural presence of The 1958 Song, a corrupted bossa nova medley by Arto Lindsay that plays on a lonely radio situated on one of the beds.
Jessica Morgan
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster was born in Strasbourg in 1965. She lives in Paris and Rio de Janeiro.