LEVITATING, SUSPENDED BRICKS

PASSAGE Series 2015 – 2020

Site-specific, immersive installations; sand, debris, bricks, foam, paint, spot light, industrial sound; dimensions variable.

For RUINS OF TIME exhibition in the Crypt Gallery in St Pancras Church, London 2015 and DISLOCATION exhibition in Rottmann Fuenf Gallery, Munich 2019, a remix of industrial sound was used.

From now to eternity, there is a dark passage, through which you need to go, in order to obtain freedom from everything that means death.

The work questions basic assumption about life, its meaning and relevance. Twisted in reality, existence reveals itself as a dark and absurd non-entity, the sense of which is a kind of simulacrum within a space of illusion. In addition, there is the physical concept of death as passing through a dark and dangerous space of otherness with a light at the end.

Simulacrum, illusion, parody of building processes, a mixture of genuine and artificial materials, deconstructive and dislocation techniques, light effects and darkness, alongside an eerie, industrial sound are the means used to create the heterotopic space of a semi geo-industrial waste environment – the absurd ruins of passing time.

In technical terms, the installations deal with a material and architectural dislocation and, in general, with an urban-space misplacement, comprising materials from the making process transposed into the surrounding space and generating an entropic waste environment, reminiscent of a war zone.

Futility and absurdity manifest themselves in the columns of ‘bricks’ hanging from the ceiling, with some ending middle way, some stretching further to the floor and just ending a few inches over it and the others bending as they reach the floor. The situation seems even more absurd when people realize that the columns with apparently heavy and dangerous looking bricks are effortlessly moving, floating and swinging from side to side when passed by.

Multiple industrial sound simultaneously coming from different tracks in the corners of the space intensify the mysteriously eerie and disconcerting atmosphere making the traversing to the borderline experience.     

Visitors are invited to decide whether to enter the semi-dark, uncanny looking space and find their way through the unstable, swinging brick columns to the opposite side with the exit, or remain at the entrance just looking at the scenery from outside. Needless to say, the perception of the work changes by going inside and making the journey through the space, discovering the illusion. The ‘passage’, starting with the decision-making, thus reveals the epic dimension of this work making it a metaphor of a bigger world –  the human existence.

Some other works with suspended, swinging ‘bricks’: SUSPENSION vs GRAVITATION, Cookhouse Gallery, London 2014, ca 450 cm (h); Installation SUSPENDED OVER MATTER, in Asylum Chapel, London 2017, ca. 715 cm (h), CEILLINSCAPE, CCA, London, 2014.