Language as Material: The Conceptual Architecture of TYPO

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The work of TYPO resists easy description, not because it evades meaning, but because it renders meaning unstable and contingent. A text artist in the most rigorous sense, TYPO doesn’t simply use language,they inhabit it, dissect it, expose its ligatures, the joins between rhetoric and ideology, intimacy and performance.

TYPO emerged in the mid-2010s from the internet fog that produced more gloss than grit, with early pieces that mimicked the spatial dislocation of browser tabs: vinyl text installations that wrapped entire rooms in iterative phrases, none of which resolved. The viewer was not asked to read so much as to navigate the space without tiring. In I Am Not Speaking (2016), black Helvetica peeled from the white walls in syncopated phrases,“I am not speaking / but you are hearing / but not me”,creating a textual stammer that implicated the audience in an act of unwilling translation.

Over the last decade, TYPO has refined this practice into something less declarative, more forensic. Their recent exhibition, Parentheticals, at the Textual Archive in Los Angeles, offered a taxonomy of asides: the gallery walls were bare save for parentheses,sculptural, textual, digital,that bracketed nothing or everything, depending on one’s interpretive tilt. The effect was not emptiness, but a kind of semantic hyperventilation.

Like other artists working in the long shadow of conceptualism,Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Kay Rosen,TYPO shares a belief in language as a site of both constraint and possibility. But where Holzer’s text is aphoristic, Rosen’s architectural, Ligon’s embodied, TYPO’s is most often incomplete. Their practice is dialogic in a literal sense: many of their pieces derive from actual conversations,transcripts, SMS exchanges, voice-to-text artifacts,abstracted until the voice dissolves and only cadence remains.

This is most evident in the 2023 piece Mutualisms, a durational performance-installation in which two typists sit across from each other, transcribing overheard conversations from a hidden mic feed elsewhere in the gallery. The typed texts are projected live, side by side, revealing the subjective distortions of each listener. Here, TYPO returns to the primal instability of language,not only as it is spoken and heard, but as it is interpreted, claimed, and misread.

Critics have sometimes dismissed TYPO’s work as overly academic, citing the density of references (Lacan, Derrida, Glissant), the footnoted titles, the avoidance of materiality beyond text. But this critique misunderstands the object of their inquiry. TYPO doesn’t use language to say something; they use it to interrogate the act of saying itself. The result is work that doesn’t seduce the eye so much as seduce the act of attention, demanding a slow, recursive engagement that refuses the passive consumption of text as image.

And yet there is beauty here. Not just in ornament, but in structure,in the deliberate architecture of confusion, in the tensions between absence and presence, between reading and not-reading. In this way, TYPO reminds us that language can sometimes be sculptural. And that meaning is something we move around, inhabit, and have to work to achieve ourselves.

Slough – the new Epicentre of World Art?

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The Grand Opening of Slough’s Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art

It was always going to be an audacious proposition: to name a new art museum after Slough,a word still laced with suburban melancholy and grey commuter-town ambivalence. But on Thursday evening, amid a slickly choreographed private view across three continents, the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art (SMCNCA) made a definitive, champagne-drenched case for its own relevance.

Though its administrative roots are firmly (and proudly) planted in a converted business park on the edge of Slough, the museum’s true public face is more global. The opening night spanned both its gleaming new flagship space on Cork Street and a formidable industrial conversion in Brooklyn, New York. These aren’t satellites,they’re the real showrooms,while Slough remains the strange conceptual anchor, the beating curatorial heart of this art organism.

The founding director, Nina Cartwright, formerly of the Serpentine and known for her whip-smart thematic shows, gave a brief, elliptical speech via live link from Slough, surrounded by a modest crowd of local councillors, young curators, and two bewildered teenagers holding cans of Monster Energy drink. “This museum is about expanding time,” she said, “not just taste.” Her partner in programming, Rajesh Banerjee, a New York transplant with a background in archival theory, nodded gravely beside her, wearing a neon green Comme des Garçons windbreaker.

At the Cork Street launch, a who’s-who of the art world turned up in a misting rain: Tracey Smits, flanked by two assistants in sequined hoodies, Ravi Van Sant, looking faintly confused but delighted, and Mark Perret, who described the whole project as “an oddly beautiful mess,like finding a Damien Hirst in Lidl’s third aisle.” Zara Bough arrived unannounced and stayed quietly in the corner of the upper gallery, taking notes.

The inaugural hang, titled “Meanwhile, Elsewhere”, attempts to collapse linearity itself, and does so with mixed but often thrilling results. Alberta Dinvil’s visceral installations,buckets of paraffin wax stacked like ancient cairns,occupy the main hall in Cork Street, facing off against a towering sculptural archive by Leo Brasov, the reclusive Russian conceptualist whose works have never before been shown outside his Moscow apartment. In the New York space, Cindy Zhao’s kinetic wall pieces buzz and tremble across corrugated iron partitions, while a video work by Jason Mbatha, shot entirely in Slough’s Queensmere car park, plays silently with the occasional hyper realistic sound of a revolver shooting a bullet.

True to its name, the museum doesn’t distinguish between “contemporary” and “non.” One room on Cork Street hosts a deeply odd, yet strangely moving pairing: a 16th-century Flemish devotional panel (on loan from an unnamed private collection) installed opposite Sophia El Amrani’s neon wall script reading, simply, “I wish I’d been worse.”

Critics will no doubt question the clunkiness of the museum’s branding,“non-contemporary” seems a semantic provocation at best,but in practice, this temporal promiscuity feels timely. We live in an era that’s as much about resurfacing and re-contextualising as it is about the new. The Slough Museum leans into that instability, making the act of curating itself a kind of speculative fiction.

There were, inevitably, early stumbles. The canapés in New York included pickled sardines with whipped licorice (dubbed “a war crime” by one critic), and a poorly timed VR piece crashed halfway through the opening, leaving guests flailing mid-air with headsets still on. But even the glitches seemed apt: this is an institution interested in rupture and recombination, not polish.

Will Slough become the next Kassel? Almost certainly not. But that’s beside the point. What the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art proves, with admirable confidence and a touch of absurdity, is that the centre doesn’t have to hold,it can spill outward, in strange and brilliant ways.

“Trudi the Tax Consultant” (2025) by Hedge Fund

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Digital

Edition of 3 (plus 1 artist’s proof)

Where Mr. Larson explored the weary grandeur of the pub entrepreneur, Trudi expands Hedge Fund’s ever-evolving thesis into the realm of Hyper-luxury , a portrait of aspiration, reinvention, and terminal optimism rendered in more riotous colours than Fund usually uses.

The subject, “Trudi,” is a tax consultant from Cheltenham who, according to footnotes on the Hedge Fund Foundation’s website, once saved an individual so much tax that she received an award from the tax authorities. The prize was given somewhat begrudgingly and the loophole she had been exploiting was immediately closed. Her identity is fluid and unmistakably symbolic , the apotheosis of the self-branding age. In Hedge Fund’s hands, Trudi is both muse and mechanism, person and platform.

Hedge Fund’s compositional strategy here borrows liberally from the color-field minimalists, the techno-ceremonial stylings of Nam June Paik, and the ego-flattening commercial polish of Sephora’s Q4 lighting schemes. Yet under all the colours surely we can discern a deeply human question being asked: What is the value of persona when it’s indistinguishable from product?

Her hair, an electric shade of mauve hardly found in nature or Pantone, defies both physics and good taste with unapologetic aplomb. The effect is disorienting and magnetic.

In the lower left corner, Hedge Fund’s signature appears, and above it a tiny embedded QR code linking to a now-defunct offshore shell company once involved in importing high value wheelie-bins from the UAE , a typical flourish of oblique autobiography from the artist, who continues to merge aesthetics with finance in a way that renders both indistinct.

Critics at the Builth Wells Digital Pavilion called the piece “simultaneously beautiful and ugly.” Trudi herself, when reached via a contact form embedded in her website offered the following statement:

“I didn’t sit for this portrait. Hedge just said he’d seen me once in a Tesco car park and that was enough. It’s a wonderful piece, I just wish I owned it!”

Trudi the Tax Consultant is currently on loan to the West London Institute of Interdisciplinary Futures, displayed in a dimly lit alcove with a placard that reads simply: “Trudi by H.Fund”.

Edinburgh Fringe Review: The Pigeon King: A One-Man Ornithological Opera

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Every August, the Edinburgh Fringe mutates into a festival where thousands of ambitious, sleep-deprived performers descend upon Scotland to demand our attention. Some bring stories about grief, or climate change, or their latest break-up. A brave few attempt to do all three. And then there’s The Pigeon King: A One-Man Ornithological Opera, which I stumbled into by mistake after confusing “Free show, free biscuits!” with a legitimate selling point. I did not receive biscuits. I did, however, receive 58 minutes of a grown man cooing at the ceiling.

The premise,if we can stretch the word “premise” over this rickety cage of feathers,is simple: one man, armed only with a velvet cape, a smoke machine that clearly hasn’t worked properly for years, and the misplaced confidence of a birdwatcher with a flair for the dramatic, tells the story of King Alfonse, a monarch who ruled over pigeons. Not metaphorical pigeons, mind you. Actual pigeons. Except, of course, there are no pigeons, because hiring birds is expensive and unhygienic. Instead, our performer, Sanger Thistle (yes, that is his real name, and yes, he told us four times), plays every pigeon himself. He does this through interpretive flapping, occasional squatting, and long sequences of guttural noises that can best be described as a man chewing a squeaky dog’s toy while remembering his divorce.

Opera is maybe not how this show should be described. There is music, in the sense that Nigel occasionally belts fragments of Italian words over a backing track. He has, to his credit, memorised at least two lines of Verdi, which he deploys whenever the going gets sticky (i.e. every nine or ten minutes). By the third time he shouted “Vincerò!” while clutching a stuffed pigeon from Poundland, the audience began to wonder whether victory was truly within reach, or if we’d all lost in some deeper, cosmic sense.

There are moments of audience interaction, naturally,this is Fringe law. Nigel selected an unfortunate man in the front row to play “The Enemy Hawk.” The man was handed a paper beak, asked to hiss menacingly, and then promptly ignored for the rest of the performance. Later, we were instructed to join in the “pigeon chorus,” which involved clapping out of time while Nigel rolled on the floor. If art is about shared experience, then certainly, we all experienced something we can never erase from memory, no matter how much therapy we pursue.

The show ends,mercifully, though not quickly,with Nigel ascending a stepladder and declaring himself “Lord of Trafalgar Square.” He then released a single balloon in the shape of a pigeon, which promptly got caught in the lighting rig. Symbolic, perhaps, of ambition meeting reality, or simply of poor balloon-handling skills.

Is The Pigeon King good? That depends on your definition of good. If good means technically competent, thoughtfully executed, or even vaguely entertaining, then no. If good means an unforgettable fever dream that will haunt you every time you pass a bird feeder, then yes, it’s a triumph.

Three stars. One for effort, one for the cape, and one for the sheer audacity of charging £12 for something that smelled faintly of damp feathers.

Slow Collapse in Five Acts: The Enigmatic World of Théo Marat

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There are artists who make things. Then there is Théo Marat, who lets things unmake themselves.

A former structural engineer turned post-object conceptualist, Marat is best known for orchestrating what he calls “durational decompositions”: large-scale sculptural installations made entirely from biodegradable, tensioned, or self-eroding materials, designed not to last, but to fail.

His 2022 breakout work, Torsion Sonata (for Quiet Buildings), consisted of five identical towers constructed from compressed salt blocks, beeswax, and linen,each nearly 40 meters tall and internally stressed by heat-reactive nickel wires. Installed in a disused greenhouse in Pau, the towers were never “exhibited” in the conventional sense. There was no opening, no audience. Only a series of thermal triggers and a network of high-frequency microphones captured the event as the towers gradually collapsed,sighing, splintering, slumping,over the course of ninety days. The footage was later condensed into a five-channel audio feed lasting five days, titled The Things That Fold Themselves In. It is the only documentation that survives.

Even calling Marat’s work “sculpture” seems misguided. His practice lives somewhere between choreography, architecture, materials science, and speculative poetics. Trained at AUJ Zurich before abandoning his doctoral research into concrete fatigue cycles in modern sculpture, Marat turned to unmaking not out of disillusionment, but dissatisfaction with engineering’s obsession with stability. “We spend so much time trying to keep things standing,” he once wrote, “but entropy is the most honest collaborator.”

In 2024’s Lacuna Engine (Prototype #7), exhibited in a refrigerated room in Rotterdam, Marat installed a grid of sugar-glass sheets suspended vertically by tensioned Kevlar cables, each positioned under carefully calibrated drips of warm water. As the droplets accumulated, stress fractures emerged. First barely visible, then suddenly structural. Visitors reported moments of near silence interrupted by crystalline chimes as panels gave way one by one, in unpredictable sequence,like a musical composition written by time.

Critics have called his work “beautifully useless” (The Swindon Post), “a kind of ritualized decay” (Contemporary Art in Harare), and even “engineering theatre.” But to dismiss Marat’s installations as gimmicks of entropy is to miss the quiet rigor of their construction. Every variable,humidity, thermal expansion coefficient, melt rate, material memory,is calculated, then deliberately baked in to the sculpture. The collapse is in no way accidental.

But perhaps Marat’s strangest, and most haunting, work to date was 2025’s Body of Agreement (Undone), a collaboration with three contract lawyers, a Japanese tailor and a textile conservator. The work was composed of a 240-page legal agreement printed in edible ink on rice paper, bound in lambskin vellum, and hand-stitched into the lining of a high-end men’s suit. The suit was worn,without explanation,by a professional actor during a six-week residency at a commercial law firm in Brussels. At the end of the residency, the actor was doused in rainwater and left standing in a public plaza, where passersby watched the ink run and the suit collapse into pulp and thread.

What is one to make of an artist like Marat? Is there a market for what he makes, when there is no physical object to acquire and often, not even a clear thesis? Yes, collectors flock to his work, which reminds them, and us, that in an art world that too often chases permanence, spectacle, or legibility, that all structures,legal, architectural, social, personal,are ultimately temporary.

Wings of Meaning: The Aeroplanic Interventions of Marja Klein

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In a remote hangar on the outskirts of Toulouse, a Lufthansa Airbus A320 glows iridescent under the lights. Not from its metallic fuselage, but from a dizzying cascade of brushstrokes on its body. This is not a corporate stunt or a conceptual prank,it’s the latest work of Marja Klein, the reclusive Dutch-German painter who has become the most controversial figure in contemporary art by doing what no painter before her has done: use aircraft,actual, operational aircraft,as her canvas. For Klein, the plane is not a vehicle but a surface.

Her practice began unassumingly enough: graduate work in neo-expressionist abstraction at the Städelschule, a few residencies in Iceland and Patagonia, and a brief stint observing some aeronautical engineers. But it was her 2019 manifesto, “The Extended Canvas: Toward a Transatmospheric Aesthetics,” that revealed her ambition. In it, she argued that traditional painting had reached a saturation point, both spatially and semantically. “If canvas is a skin,” she wrote, “why not paint the organs of global movement? Why not paint the very arteries through which tourism and commerce flow?”

The first iteration of this idea,Fuselage No. 1 (For Barnett Newman),landed, quite literally, at Charles de Gaulle in early 2021. A retired cargo jet, reactivated temporarily for the work, bore a single red zip line down its side, splitting a field of hand-painted electric blue. It drew criticism from both art world purists and aviation traditionalists. “It’s neither safe nor comprehensible,” said one Parisian curator/pilot, who didn’t want to be named. “It’s somewhere between performance and vandalism.”

Undeterred, Klein’s work escalated. In collaboration with several independent air fleets and a little-known Estonian aerospace coating company, she began producing what she calls aero-paintings: labour-intensive, site-specific works executed directly onto the planes, which are then returned to flight. Each one requires months of bureaucratic negotiation, FAA consultations, and custom pigment development to withstand the UV exposure and atmospheric pressure changes. And yet, to Klein, all this is part of the piece.

These aircraft,glimpsed only briefly by passengers on the tarmac or through terminal windows,become ephemeral galleries of motion. “I’m not interested in permanence,” she said in a rare interview. “I’m interested in distribution. In becoming part of someone’s memory of a journey.”

Her 2024 project “Flightpath Diptych” involved two Boeing 737s: one painted in a palette of pale greens and muted greys based on 1950s Soviet military maps; the other inscribed with layers of coded writing drawn from declassified Cold War-era weather reports. The planes crossed paths over the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, their coordinated flight paths generating a skyborne choreography visible only to satellite tracking systems and a small group of Klein’s paid subscribers who were given access to the live telemetry data.

Art historians struggle to categorize her work. Is it painting, performance, installation? Environmental art? Some invoke Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; others trace her lineage to Gutai, to Yves Klein, to Panamarenko or Hipplo. But Klein herself resists the comparisons.

In so doing, she has raised thorny questions about authorship, temporality, and visibility. Philistine aviation crews mean that her planes are often cleaned or repainted without notice. A work might last six months or six days. Sometimes, she leaves only a signature in a hard-to-spot area- these stay airborne longer according to plane spotters/collectors around the world who have welcomed her work, tracking her oeuvre with vigilance, flight logs, and their familiarity with global aviation routes.

Yet for those who catch a glimpse,on a runway in Jakarta, during taxiing in São Paulo, or parked beside a generic corporate fleet in Oslo,Klein’s work lands like a glitch in the visual field. A disruption of the technocratic gloss of modern air travel. A reminder that the sky, too, can be colonized by art.

Since this piece was written we have heard that the B&A is reportedly in talks with Klein to acquire her entire series of aircraft skins in digital replica form.

Davos: Cows, Clouds, Carpets

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The greatest conceptual artist working today has made another masterpiece. Pimlico Wilde are pleased to present Cows, Clouds, Carpets to the market.

Year: 2025

Medium: Fog brought from the mid-Atlantic, two borrowed dairy cows (rotated weekly), three flying carpets (grounded by health and safety), sandwiches (triangular), and a ceiling painted to look like the floor.

Dimensions: Constantly shifting.

Davos’ “Cows, Clouds, Carpets” presents itself as a meditation on weight and levity, earth and sky, udder and ether. Visitors enter the gallery to discover two cows placidly grazing on a carpet of artificial turf. Above them, three ornate Persian flying carpets should hover. A wall text explains that owing to health and safety restrictions, the carpets have had to be placed on the ground, the visitor must imagine them in flight.

A little mid-Atlantic fog is gently released every 47 seconds, obscuring visibility and encouraging visitors to step gingerly, lest they mistake a cow for a carpet or vice versa. The ceiling has been painted with meticulous trompe-l’œil to resemble the gallery floor, leaving some viewers unsure whether they are standing on the ground at all.

A small tray of sandwiches, replenished daily, rests on a low plinth near the entrance. They are triangular, crustless, and entirely untouched. They are both offering and warning.

“When we are no longer sure what is beneath us, we may finally understand what it means to float.”

, Davos

The cows, borrowed (not hired, this is important) from a farm in Kent, provide a necessary grounding element: slow, heavy, deliberate presences that counterbalance the illusory weightlessness being imagined above.

The sandwiches play a less obvious but no less important role. The artist insists they are not for eating. They represent sustenance denied, a reminder that conceptual nourishment is rarely digestible. Their triangular form, Davos claims, echoes both pyramid and wedge: “Forms that aspire, but never quite arrive.”

The fog ensures the work is never seen in full clarity, suggesting that understanding is always partial and that cows, too, can be ethereal if conditions permit.

Visitor Guidelines:

• Do not attempt to ride the carpets, no matter how strong the temptation.

• The cows may look approachable. They are not.

• Please do not eat the sandwiches. Buyable sandwiches are available in the café.

• If you lose your sense of up and down, sit quietly until the fog clears.

Price: £1.4 million (including painted ceiling and contractual rights to temporarily borrow cows. NB: the fog is not included and will have to be sourced separately by the purchaser.

Limited Edition Artifact: A triangular sandwich cast in resin (edition of 25), available for £190,000 each.

Critics’ Reactions:

• The Welsh Art Magazine : “A sublime balance between bovine mass and mystical lift.”

• The Harewood Guardian: “I watched a cow stare at a carpet for ten minutes. Magica; I left convinced of art’s continuing power.”

With “Cows, Clouds, Carpets”, Davos offers a profound, solemn meditation on the tension between heaviness and flight, sustenance and illusion, cow and carpet.

Chromatic Patronage: Margery Denton in Digital Reverie. By Hedge Fund

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Hedge Fund’s playful portrait of Margery Denton,the distinguished collector whose discerning eye has helped shape contemporary taste,radiates with an energy equal to its subject’s legacy. In vivid blocks of colour, Denton emerges not as a static likeness, but as an emblem of the cultural vitality she has so long championed. The golden glow of her skin, framed by a lavender sweep of hair, speaks less to realism than to aura: Denton as a figure who has illuminated galleries and institutions with her vision and patronage.

The artist draws knowingly upon the language of Pop Art, echoing the boldness of Warhol’s portraits of society icons, yet infuses the work with a distinctly digital sensibility. The turquoise brows, crimson lips, and jewel-sparkling earrings transform Denton into a near-mythic presence, at once glamorous and approachable. This is not the art collector as distant connoisseur, but as vibrant muse,rendered in a palette that affirms her role in expanding the possibilities of what art can be.

One cannot help but read this work as a dialogue between subject and medium. Denton, who dedicated her life to championing the new, is immortalized here through a digital vernacular that itself represents a frontier in visual culture. The portrait is both tribute and continuation: a collector who celebrated innovation now celebrated through innovation.

To live with this image is to live with more than a likeness of Margery Denton. It is to participate in her ongoing legacy, to acknowledge the spirit of curiosity and boldness that defined her career, and to carry forward the very ethos she embodied,that art must always remain fearless, luminous, and alive.

Edinburgh Fringe Review: Mind the Gap – A Love Story Performed Entirely Inside a Wheelie Bin

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Among the thousands of shows this year clamouring for our attention, Mind the Gap managed to stand out,largely because it was staged inside an actual council-issued wheelie bin.

Yes, that’s right. The performer, who introduces himself only as “Gregor, Keeper of the Lid,” spends the entire 55 minutes inside the bin, popping his head out occasionally to whisper sweet nothings about his doomed affair with the London Underground. The narrative, such as it exists, revolves around Gregor’s passionate yet forbidden love for the Piccadilly Line. “She was always late, but so am I,” he sighs, before lowering himself back into his plastic coffin and shaking it violently to simulate “the rumble of a train through the tunnels of desire.”

From the moment the show begins, audience comfort is not considered. We are crammed into a makeshift venue that resembles the back corridor of a Greggs, seated on stools that feel like they’ve been designed as a warning against sedentary lifestyles. The smell of bin plastic under stage lights fills the room, creating an atmosphere that can best be described as austerity chic.

The performance itself is a kind of postmodern endurance test. Gregor alternates between monologues about his subterranean romance and long periods of silence where he simply closes the lid and leaves us in darkness. One audience member whispered, “Is this part of it?” only to be shushed by Gregor’s muffled voice from inside: “All silence is part of it.”

There is, inevitably, music. At the 37-minute mark, Gregor produces a battered kazoo, pokes it through the bin slot, and wheezes out a haunting rendition of something that may have once been My Heart Will Go On. This, he tells us, represents “the signal failures of my soul.” A few people giggled; the rest stared into the void, wondering whether leaving early would constitute art criticism or self-preservation.

The finale is bold, if not exactly triumphant. Gregor attempts to climb fully out of the bin, tangling himself in his own prop railway map, before collapsing to the floor and declaring, “We are all commuters of the heart!” The house lights come up, revealing an audience unsure whether to clap, call for help, or demand a refund. In the end, we did clap, partly out of politeness and partly because we were relieved it was over.

Two stars.

One Star Reviews: The Calcium of Dreams – Toward an Invertebrate Consciousness

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“A Stunning Exploration of Absolutely Nothing”

An exhibition by the visionary choreo-sculpturalist Glinté Pavlova at The Wilhelm Centre for Emergent Visualities

I came to The Calcium of Dreams with an open heart, a functioning brain, and a decent pair of shoes. I left it emotionally concussed, intellectually bludgeoned, and deeply suspicious of mollusks. This show, which bills itself as “a radical unraveling of exoskeletal trauma and the pain of becoming,” manages to combine the sensory thrill of standing in a flooded basement with the intellectual rigour of a dolphin quoting Derrida.

Curated across three floors of The Wilhelm Centre,an institution already infamous for hosting last year’s Sneeze as Praxis,this show is the latest offering from Glinté Pavlova, a Lithuanian-born “articulationist” known for once glueing a taxidermied chihuahua to a Xerox machine. Here, she has turned her sights on “the ancient tensions between softness and structure, organism and architecture, bone and metaphor.”

The moment you enter, you’re greeted by Cephalopod Requiem I, a 12-foot-tall canvas mollusk shell coated in what looks like glitter, Nutella, and hair. Inside, an animatronic mannequin dressed as a Victorian funeral director periodically belches the word “legacy” in five languages. One elderly woman who entered the room when I did simply said, “No,” and walked out.

Not a good start. Unfortunately things only deteriorate from there.

On the second floor, the section labeled The Cartilage Suite offers viewers a chance to walk barefoot across a bed of discarded socks while a projector flashes MRI scans of knees onto a series of melting ice sculptures shaped like reclining nudes. A gallery attendant stood nearby ringing a Tibetan singing bowl every time someone looked confused, which meant the room sounded like an insufferable wind chime shop during an earthquake.

A video installation titled Mollusk as Mind: A Liquid Allegory features Pavlova submerged in a giant bowl of lukewarm almond milk, rotating slowly while reciting a list of 19th-century shipwrecks in reverse chronological order. It runs for six hours. I lasted 40 seconds before I began rooting for the concept of drowning.

Then there’s Calcium Interlude IV: The Oyster Screams, an audio installation played exclusively through floor speakers so you experience it with your feet. It’s described as “a sonification of ancestral pressure points”,what that seems to mean is that it’s 45 minutes of low-frequency moaning and what sounded like someone chewing wetly on rubber gloves. A nearby plaque quoted Pavlova saying, “Sound is texture without the burden of form.”

And then there was the “participatory piece.”

Entitled You Are the Exoskeleton, it involves donning a transparent PVC bodysuit and crawling through a maze of egg cartons while blindfolded, led only by the sound of a recorded Pavlova whispering just too quietly to be understood. I declined to participate, citing dignity. Still, I watched as two grad students took part; both were weeping softly by the end. One sat on the floor muttering whilst the other just rocked back and forth, whispering.

The obligatory gift shop at the end offered merchandise including “boneless memory sachets” (small bags of damp sand with handwritten haikus inside), calcium-themed posters, and a $360 “emotional clam knife” carved from recycled acrylic nails. I bought a pencil just to remind myself that functional objects still exist in the world.

To be perfectly clear: I’m not opposed to challenging art. I’m not a philistine. I once spent three hours watching an artist eat a bicycle whilst riding it, in Berlin. But The Calcium of Dreams is not challenging,it’s exhausting, directionless, and deeply enamored with the sound of its own nonsense.

It is the art-world equivalent of being stuck at a dinner party next to someone who won’t stop talking about their favourite kombucha – yes, I speak from experience.

One star. And that star is shaped like a mollusk, dying slowly in the sun.