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Steve Bishop, installation view of the exhibition
Deliquescing, installation in five parts, KW Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2018, photo: Frank Sperling
Courtesy the artist and Carlos/Ishikawa, London
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DELIQUESCING
CURATOR ANNA GRITZ
ASSISTANT CURATOR MAURIN DIETRICH
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART BERLIN
3 NOV 18 – 6 JAN 19
“I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Fred Madison, Lost Highways.
Memory betrays, deceives. We all know this. Reality is constantly manipulated, rewritten, even invented. The truth is stretched from one side to the other. It's even ourselves to deceive ourselves. In some cases the memory slips away like water in a tap drain. But what are we without our memories?In the exhibition Deliquescing the British artist Steve Bishop speaks of memory through its alteration par excellence: Alzheimer's disease.
The exhibition, curated by Anna Gritz and co-curated by Maurin Dietrich, consists of a large site-specific installation. The entire KW's floor is transformed into a simulated waiting room for a paradoxical laboratory. The entrance to the rooms is obstructed by plastic curtains. As soon as you enter the space a spectral atmosphere envelops you. A soft and opaque moist is embracing everything.
In the first room there is a wall covered with shelve which exposes a line of big rocks, wrapped in plastic, with small numbers on them, probably a date. On some of the rocks, puffy white mushrooms have flourished. They seems to have healing properties for Alzheimer's disease. As a matter of fact, these mushrooms are created by a particular mold that, thanks to the humidity, exudes a liquid that becomes the white puffy fungus. The exhibition refers precisely to the transforming capability of memory that fluidly takes different forms.
Next to the wall with the mushroom, there is a small monitor where it scrolls a report of a woman in an early phase of Alzheimer's. The woman tells her experience and her feelings about being ill and about her relationship with her mother, who was also ill. She explains that she often pretends to recognise people when she talks to them. And when she was a child she used to lie to her mother, when she "forgot" her father's death, making up a story just to make her happy.
In the next room, a film shows a deserted town in northern Canada, built in 1981 to house the workers of a nearby mine and then abandoned in 1983. Nowadays only a guardian lives there. His job is to prevent nature from taking over, in a constant effort not to fall into oblivion. In the corridors between the two spaces a thin transparent curtain is covering the original KW's walls. Through we could see some photos of the abandoned town. Near the exit, two huge freezers keeps the large moldy rocks.
These rocks are not our memories, but the emotions that anchor us to them. The whole installation of Bishop is a bit of a reproduction of our inner state. Feelings are resting in a corner ready to be defrosted. But once outside, exposed to the mistiness of thought and life they are transformed and liquefied, producing something else.
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