Mischievous and disorientating
Shuddering bells announce the exhibition before you have had a chance to make sense of the space you have entered. In front of you lies a decaying body of rubble. A relic? An object of worship? The bells chime from all around, are they funerary, a precession, a prayer? What ceremony have we entered?
From the outset of Justin Caguiat’s new Serpentine South exhibition, looking becomes entangled with listening, and material things acquire an uncertain, almost spiritual presence, writes Leo Dunlop.
Sound is central to the exhibition’s intelligence. As you move through the rooms, its shifting emphasis directs your attention, drawing individual works into unexpected relationships. A chime makes you turn back; works suddenly demand a second glance. The exhibition establishes its own rhythm of looking, using sound to unsettle the authority of the eye, manipulating our gaze.
The works inhabit a similar state of uncertainty. Stone is made flesh, while technological and organic forms appear caught in the process of becoming one another, poised between destruction and decay.
The exhibition walls have been chipped away to expose brickwork and pipes, bringing the building’s usually concealed anatomy into view. Alongside the furnace artwork, these exposed surfaces suggest something elemental: fire, stone, the structures and materials through which human life takes shape. There is an archaeological quality it, as though the works have been uncovered within the building.
Yet this apparent excavation is also a deliberate exercise in controlling the viewer. Doorways become windows; openings allowing a view while denying passage. Works placed on the floor or beneath seats disrupt the comfortable expectation that art will meet us at eye level, exploding the curatorial norms. The arrangement is most effective when these altered sightlines make you conscious of your own body, bending, turning and searching for a way through.
A film room tucked away at the back provides the most playful surprise. It feels as though there ought not to be room for it, as if the gallery has acquired an impossible depth. Mischievous and disorientating, this spatial sleight of hand amplifies the sense that the exhibition is constantly shifting around us.
Bare yet complex, the exhibition achieves its phantasmagoria through the precise arrangement of matter, space and sound. The exhibition continues until the 10th of January 2027 at Serpentine’s South Gallery.
Full details: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/justin-caguiat-change-ringing/
