There are times when life feels overwhelming and uncontrollable. We become plugged into a reality in which everything is a click away. Communication a constant stream; time and space feel boundless and formless; what should be manageable becomes something we can’t control. We construct an environment that at times feels inescapable.
In this anxiety-ridden state, it becomes hard to keep ahold of time. It becomes hard to return it to something linear and neat in which you can say “I can have this moment, this is the space in which I can breathe”. By stepping outside of everyday routine, we are slowly allowed to take control over what feels too big to manage and to escape what feels fixed.
The Store Studios have created a space that allows you to do just that. It is an exhibition of an “interconnected journey” of the work of various artists shown by the Lisson Gallery, running in parallel with certain commissions from the Vinyl Factory too. The exhibition, entitled “Everything At Once”, is excellent. The very nature of it being a gallery, however, means it is also a space in which one can move around and choose where to stay, observe, and choose what to confront. Two specific pieces that struck me enforced a certain stillness and focus on the viewer – an encompassing sense that serves to separate your “being” from the deceptively inconvenient world of “everything at once”.
Ryoji Ikeda: Test Pattern [No. 12]
Ikeda’s installation presents an audio-visual piece that converts the data from various media into monochrome patterns on the floor while immersing the viewer in highly-charged kinetic sounds. The audio and lighting of this piece are generated in real time; it is a disorienting, chaotic experience that forces you to take time out of your own mind and find the space to just revel in the work that he has created. It is a piece so intense and immersive that you have no choice but to forget everything for the duration of it.
Shirazeh Houshiary: Breath
In 2000, Houshiary described her work as an effort to “set out to capture my own breath, to find the essence of my own experience, transcending name, nationality, cultures.” Her piece entitled Breath encapsulates this description perfectly.
You enter through a narrow passage into a rectangular enclosure draped in black fabric, that has a screen on each wall. From each screen the chants of Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Islamic prayers fill the room in a beautiful, yet haunting chorus of voices. As the chants of each different tradition expand and contract, the star-like lights on the screen intensify and fade in parallel.
It is a similarly immersive piece that can help you to find that moment in which all you need to do is breathe with the vocalists and watch the natural cycle of decay and creation. Yet this is also what makes it a saddening experience. Within the enclosure there is such a strong feeling of unity that you feel yourself sync to the ebb and flow of light and sound, however it also serves as a reminder of the reality outside of those walls. There is a tension between the pure simplicity of what you experience and the discordant conflict that pervades everyday life.
If Ikeda’s installation serves to “out-whelm” the already overwhelming state of your mind, Houshiary forces you to take a step out and a step back from every-day existence and gifts you a sense of perspective in the face of processual disintegration. Indeed it is an opportunity to just breathe and relinquish the need for control in the face of the natural cycles of the universe and the spiritual way in which we often try to make sense of it. It holds you in a liminal space, allowing you to take pause on the boundary between different times and spaces.
I would thoroughly recommend this exhibition for those who need an opportunity to take some time out and just breathe. In a climate that sometimes seems to demand too much, this exhibition is the perfect place to remind us to slow down and escape every-day life in order to quieten the pervasive noise of our minds.
‘Everything At Once” is being shown at Store Studios, 180 The Strand until December 10th. Admission is free.
