Alicja Kwade’s Medium Median: Far From Middling

The Whitechapel Gallery has no permanent collection, but the relatively recent introduction of its Commissions Gallery provides a stage for longer term exhibitions to complement the fast turn over of exhibits in the rest of the building.

This Commissions Gallery serves as a forum for artists’ exper-imentation and as such, for the next nine months will host Berlin-based artist, Alicja Kwade’s, ﬁrst UK solo show: Medium Median. Kwade’s work is a sculptural piece supported by a video installation, and explores our relation to space and time through the examination of the geographical, mathematical, and the topological. It attempts to catalyse inﬁnite, invisible and unmeasurable concepts through material objects and cast them into sculptural form. ‘This work is inspired by a very early work of mine made while I was at art school,’ explains Kwade. ‘I researched the position of the stars which today are visible through the windows of a house and still will be when the world ceases to exist.’

At its centrepiece is a kinetic sculpture; a hanging mobile of mobile phones. Kwade describes the work as demonstrating the measuring of time, from its earliest form to the most contemporary, with a constantly rotating mobile bringing everything together. Twenty four smart phones dangle in space, each running the same Star Guide application.

Visible on their screens are different charts detailing the stars in the area of sky at which they are pointed. The mobile moves randomly at different speeds and revolutions and as the phones move, the map of stars displayed on their screens changes. Using technology in this way is, Kwade says, of huge signiﬁcance. ‘We refer to hand held screens on a daily basis and they have become an extension of our senses. We are all connected to satellites which circuit the globe and can track where we are, demonstrating our position in the universe. We can also see the position of stars in space, some of which don’t exist anymore so we are essentially seeing an image of something extinct.’

The result is that the observer is placed at the centre of the universe. This is Kwade’s comment on our species’ egocentrism. We think of time and space only as it relates to ourselves and we are the creators of everything. Abstract bronze shapes recalling Hepworth and Moore orbit this centrepiece. The bronzes are ac-tually based on vertebrae of dinosaurs. Kwade worked with palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum in Berlin to scan the bones into CAD and then, using the computer as a sculptor’s tool, altered them according to her imagination, to ﬁll in any missing parts, before translating them into bronze. Their forms are deliberately very proportionate in their dimensions, to mirror the naturally harmonious proportions found in nature.

Proportions which are ingrained in our understanding of aesthetics, whether by similarity, coincidence or invested meaning. Kwade then places these bio-morphic casts in the direct vicinity of her visual representation of the known universe. The third element of the piece is a large video screen displaying 3D radar images from Nasa of asteroids. Here we see how the binary nature of probability makes the invisible visible. The asteroids are only observable through radar by detecting matter out of negative space. They are not the actual objects themselves, they are images constructed of an approximation and therefore bridge the relationship between the kinetic sculpture’s negative void of space and the tangible physical form of the bronzes.

There is also an audio element to the work. A voice reading the book of Genesis from the bible is played through the individual mobile phones. Each recording is out of sync by only fractions of a second, so that it sounds like an analogue chorus. However, the theological aspect is not relevant here. What Kwade is interested in is the narratological model that serves as a template of stories we tell to to ourselves to make sense of the universe and the world.

Kwade is interested in how Genesis acts as just one such explanation. ‘I was also fascinated by this idea that a computerised voice,” she says. “[It’s] something which has become very much part of modern life which we can ask to do things for us, reading out a passage from the bible, one of our oldest texts.’ In this piece Kwade confronts the most feminine of concepts - the creation and destruction of life. The act of bringing into being. But, she says, she prefers to steer clear of deﬁnitive labels and meanings behind her work. ‘It is my intention for visitors and viewers to interpret what they see be-fore their eyes in their own way,’ she explains.

Surrounded by 150 million year old bones, we are placed at the centre of the universe, as images of asteroids, which we know to have ultimately destroyed the dinosaurs, loom silently, threatening to end everything. Kwade confronts us with methods employed to make sense of the world and generate meaning from the abstract. In doing so she creates a dialogue with history which echoes in rings through time for millions of years in all directions.

EMILY BLAND