Entry: Free
The Victoria Miro is not very welcoming to passers-by. There are no windows at the front and the door, which also lacks windows, is kept shut. To get in you have to press a buzzer. It's definitely somewhere you have to intend to go rather than somewhere you might just visit because it looks interesting as you walk past. If I hadn't been told about the current exhibition by a work colleague I would have missed out on it completely.
Until January 21st the gallery is showing an exhibition by Alex Hartley called "The World Is Still Big". I hadn't heard of Hartley prior to this show, (it turns out that he's one of the 12 artists in the UK Arts Councils' “Artists taking the lead” project, their flagship project for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, but more on this later), but was immediately convinced to visit the exhibition by the gallery's description of the show as the "most recent culmination of his on-going investigation into dystopian architecture”.
The exhibition has three parts to it: a series of very large photographs; a sculpture in the upper gallery; and a geodesic dome in which Hartley is living for the duration of the show.* The photographs form the main body of the exhibition and rather than leaving them as straightforward prints Hartley has added sculptural elements to them. Each photograph shows a desolate, inhospitable landscape with a human habitation in it. The man-made structures are three-dimensional and either project out of the surface of the print or are cut into it. From a distance they blend into the print, but up close your attention is drawn to them. The gallery's description of the show says that the structures “present narratives alluding to the creation of something that has turned against us and become uninhabitable”, but that wasn't what I took away from the exhibition. I was simply struck by how humans have found a way to live in every environment our planet has to offer. Hartley's photographs highlight our presence in even the most remote of locations.
Hartley's project for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad is “Nowhereisland” and also incorporates remote locations. In 2004 Hartley visited the Arctic with an organisation called Cape Farewell and discovered a new island there. Apparently he is now sailing part of this island all the way to the south of England, where it will open an embassy. Interestingly, Wikipedia has a slightly different version – it seems that the island is officially called Nyskjæret (Norwegian for Nowhere Island) and it was named by the Norwegian Polar Institute, although Hartley did discover it (he originally wanted to call it Nymark). The thing that will be travelling along the south coast of England will be a scale model of the island, not an actual piece of the island, which makes a lot more sense. Semantics aside, you can become a citizen of Nowhereisland and help write its constitution if that kind of thing interests you.
*Yes, you read that correctly. He has built himself a little house in the Miro's back garden. Will he be spending Christmas there? The show doesn't answer this question, but I can tell you that he has some chickens. His dome is pretty dystopian looking – it's pieces are rusted and mismatched and it's only accessible by boat – and is apparently intended as a reference to Drop City, the 1960s counter-culture community. I am a terrible art critic and so I spent my time wondering how difficult it would be to build my own geodesic dome to live in when civilisation collapses.
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