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A trip to Santander, Basel and Seoul, accompanied by Martha Rosler’s Airport imagery triggers a reflection on the ways different materials and media articulate our increasingly destabilised present.

Text by Christabel Stewart 

Thomas Demand has taken on Renzo Piano’s “floating” Centro Botin in Santander, Spain, with Mundo del Papel, a show that is both an erudite play on the suspended architecture and another profound expression of the German artist’s belief in paper. Within the sumptuous light-filled exhibition space, he has suspended eight large-scale photographs of his meticulous paper and card recreations of media images, which he hopes chime with the feeling that life – with its politics and pandemic – is somehow “hanging in the air”. The images continue his long-time interest in the subtleties of truth – “not factual truth, but fictional truth”, as he puts it – in work that questions the sense of veracity and reality we place in paper. It can be seen in the photograph of his recreated pile of the paperwork that Donald Trump prominently displayed – but never discussed – at a press conference in January 2017, and which reporters were never allowed to see. A portentous symbol of the empty promises and lies to come. Another image shows a poignant recreation of the last meal ordered by Whitney Houston before her death at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2012. Recreated in pastel-coloured papers, this eerie collection of mundane detritus, brings back the anxiety of a death brought about by unhappiness and the complications of that peculiarly modern mix of addiction and fame.

Suspension is also used in the display of drawings at Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger (KBH.G), a centre founded by artist and philanthropist Sybille Piermattei-Geiger in 2018. The exhibition, Music – A Conversation Through Song Titles, has an “artist to artist” format created by Admir Jahic and Comenius Roethlisberger: the pair wrote down a song title and took turns requesting another track in answer to the previous one, resulting in a poetic, melancholic and surreal dialogue, to which they then invited artists from around the world to contribute. This format emulates their successful book, Artists Recipes, which invited artists to submit their treasured recipes and illustrations, including Claire Fontaine’s Risotto Balls.

From the 80 artists who responded to Jahic and Roethlisberger’s invitation, Mandy El Sayegh contributed the poignant Pictured from Music, featuring the lyric “two minutes to midnight” from Iron Maiden’s 1984 track “Powerslave”, to which she replied with “Six Days”, DJ Shadow’s 2002 track, and illustrated with a collaged news article about Stephen Lawrence, whose death 28 years ago was once again recently in the news. Each element reflects her interest in the complex interactions between bodies and the political, and the economic and linguistic structures that contain them.

Sarah Staton has been interested in retail as artistic practice since the early 1990s, when she began to investigate the rapidly changing function of public retail spaces in the UK as shopping malls began to replace high-street shops. The resulting SupaStore project first launched in London in 1994 and has since continued at museums, galleries and alternative venues all over the world. One was a joint exhibition in Minneapolis in 2016 that was displayed alongside Martha Rosler’s In the Place of the Public: Airport Series. The conflation of the two artists’ work blended travel and trade and fused theoretical investigation and personal insight with social and political analysis, into the structures and logistics of terminals as highly commercialised spaces.

SupaStore’s most recent iteration was SupaStore/Pressure Drop at the Cylinder in Seoul, South Korea, which created a mood for our current times: destabilised, vulnerable and brittle. It utilises modes of production that respond to this moment of travel complexity on a fragile planet with digitised images sent electronically to Seoul to be printed. The show honoured the efforts of artists who have continued creating and finding ways to articulate the human experience as we live it now, such as Dan Mitchell’s commentary accompanying his poster: “Pity is the existential plight of the consumer. We want everything, this is impossible, so we desperately seek out anything, choice becomes futile as that something escapes us, finally we end up with nothing.” ◉