Block Universe
Mayfair Fringe (2018) – Studio Squat, Oxford Street, London.
Artists: Matteo Valario, Fabio Dartizio, Boaz Torfstein, Alastair Laas, Tom Cardew, Sofiya Bonato, Aleksandr Tishkov, Boaz Torfstein, Hyun Ah Kwon, Joe Richardson, Jolanta Basova, Kang Gao, Marylyn Molisso, Natalie Lambert, Orna Kazimi, Theresa Goessmann, Tiffany Howe
Block Universe was made in a squatted office building on Oxford Street, London. Constructed as part of a collective occupation of a space scheduled for renovation, rooms were temporarily reclaimed from redevelopment and repurposed as studios and an exhibition space for a three-month period. The project was undertaken as an artist residency under Arebyte – a London-based arts organisation whose parallel programme of working with developers to secure affordable space for artists made the occupation a natural extension of their existing practice.
The room Laas shared with Korean artist Hyun Ah Kwon held its own internal conversation. Kwon's practice works at the threshold between private and public space, using light and projection to blur the boundary between an inner and outer self – the sublime located precisely in that dissolution. The room, situated above one of London's most relentlessly public corridors, was already charged with that tension.
Into this space Laas introduced a bag of sand hanging from the ceiling on a rope, its weight having dislodged the surrounding tiles and disturbed the fluorescent grid above. Two metronomes sounded at different tempos: the first calibrated to the speed of the consuming public passing the entrance below, unaware of the activity above them; the second to the artist's own pace – slower, more deliberate, stepped back from the current visible through the studio window. On a broken mirror, shattered but still intact as a single, fragmented surface, a remnant of the building's own disintegration, sat a small carved bone keepsake, a gift from a friend given years previous.
The room Laas shared with Korean artist Hyun Ah Kwon held its own internal conversation. Kwon's practice works at the threshold between private and public space, using light and projection to blur the boundary between an inner and outer self – the sublime located precisely in that dissolution. The room, situated above one of London's most relentlessly public corridors, was already charged with that tension.
Into this space Laas introduced a bag of sand hanging from the ceiling on a rope, its weight having dislodged the surrounding tiles and disturbed the fluorescent grid above. Two metronomes sounded at different tempos: the first calibrated to the speed of the consuming public passing the entrance below, unaware of the activity above them; the second to the artist's own pace – slower, more deliberate, stepped back from the current visible through the studio window. On a broken mirror, shattered but still intact as a single, fragmented surface, a remnant of the building's own disintegration, sat a small carved bone keepsake, a gift from a friend given years previous.
The mirror does not resolve. It holds its fractures and goes on reflecting – the shopping public outside, the room above, the object placed upon it with care. A good luck charm on a broken surface in a building scheduled for demolition: the gesture is neither ironic nor sentimental, but precisely poised between the two. The bone, worked by hand and carried across years, sits inside a system – Oxford Street, the property market, the residency, the show – that has no language for what it represents. It simply remains.
The work was made at a moment of rupture – following a breakdown, and a departure from the structured time of academic life into professional practice with no institutional support beyond the community immediately around him. The squatted building was not incidental to this; it was its direct expression. A space held outside normal time, outside the logic of development and productivity, for exactly as long as it could be.
The work takes its cue from a proposition made by an earlier artist that time itself could be liberated, declared free from the rhythms of productivity and exchange. Block Universe tests that proposition in the specific conditions of Oxford Street, one of Europe's highest footfall retail corridors, where the measurement of time is inseparable from the measurement of spend. The sand shifts imperceptibly. The metronomes refuse to agree. The ceiling, already compromised, holds.
The work was made at a moment of rupture – following a breakdown, and a departure from the structured time of academic life into professional practice with no institutional support beyond the community immediately around him. The squatted building was not incidental to this; it was its direct expression. A space held outside normal time, outside the logic of development and productivity, for exactly as long as it could be.
The work takes its cue from a proposition made by an earlier artist that time itself could be liberated, declared free from the rhythms of productivity and exchange. Block Universe tests that proposition in the specific conditions of Oxford Street, one of Europe's highest footfall retail corridors, where the measurement of time is inseparable from the measurement of spend. The sand shifts imperceptibly. The metronomes refuse to agree. The ceiling, already compromised, holds.