Domain of Things

Three persons inhabit an underground space, above them, is a domestic scene. The bodies lie horizontally and articulate parts of the structure as it moves forward in interlocked disarray, almost broken but still held together.

These subjects are almost unaffected as if they had not yet realised that their surroundings have been transformed. They are suspended as undead bodies of a future that has not arrived. A stark division of space into above and underground is at the heart of this artwork. On the one hand, the aboveground functions as the world that we know today, interconnected and saturated. The underground, on the other hand, carries cultural associations from films and literature where entire societies migrate below the surface and develop a new way of life. Domain of Things looks at the relationship between the underground and catastrophe, but it rests on the underground rather as a liminal space, as a moment after the cataclysm and before adaptation.

Istanbul Biennial, A Good Neighbour (c. by Elmgreen & Dragset) / 2017

TENT Rotterdam, Anytime Now (c. Anke Bangma) / 2018