‘A slippery, liminal thing with no limits’ – exploring cultural hybridity at Zabludowicz Gallery

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 2

Culture isn’t singular. Humans have long been travelling beyond their own communities, becoming a weird mixture of all kinds of influences. As the title of a new exhibition at Zabludowicz Gallery suggests, culture is a rupturing and binding of languages, states, and contexts: No horizon, no edge to liquid. A slippery, liminal thing with no limits.

Culture is a rupturing and binding of languages, states, and contexts

The title is derived from Canadian-Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje’s ‘In the Skin of a Lion’ (1987), which follows immigrants who played a significant role in building the city of Toronto in the early 1900s, but one that was never credited. Ondaatje’s novel is about the wearing and shedding of skins and masks, and the translations and transformations of identity across different cultures. As is our exhibition.

As for skins, visitors are invited to try on Laura Lima’s ‘Costumes’ (2006). Though no directions are given to suggest how one might wear these pieces, at least a mirror is provided. Some experimentation, and you end up cyborgian. Like someone who has become entangled in — and fused with — warped, industrial PVC curtains.

Some experimentation, and you end up cyborgian. Like someone who has become entangled in — and fused with — warped, industrial PVC curtains.

Lima has created a hybrid form in these wearable sculptures — does their status shift, art to garment, when worn or hung? More importantly, does yours? Who will you be, in all your glorious plurality, when you put them on?

Woolfalk, Sanya_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 1

Woolfalk, Sanya_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 5

Woolfalk, Sanya_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 4

Woolfalk, Sanya_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 3

Woolfalk, Sanya_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 2

Explorations of metamorphosis and augmentation continue in Saya Woolfak’s ‘Life Products by ChimaTEK’ (2014), a work that builds on her world of the Empathics, a fictional race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. Woolfalk’s video installation is a mock-corporate advertisement for a machine that distills the transformative energies of luminescent rocks, allowing its users to ‘hybridise’ themselves and reach elevated state of consciousness.

With this machine, customers are able to transcend limits imposed by sexism, racism and ethnocentrism. Woolfalk’s is an optimistic, utopian vision, as reflected in her aesthetic. Notably in her use of costumes: a bright pink, petaloid headdress, the kind you might expect to find at a carnival. Just as the Empathics’ machine would flatten out difference, a carnival collapses social hierarchies, creating a hybrid space that stands in opposition to fixed national identities.

This sense of the carnivalesque suffuses Raqib Shaw’s opulent painting (hanging here, fittingly, on what used to be an altar.) In ‘The Purification of the Temple (After Venusti) II’ (2014-15), Shaw recasts Marcello Venusti’s temple as a place to worship Shiva, East mingling with West. In the top half of the painting, where we might expect to find godliness and angels, we instead find a devilish, undead creature with antlers whose minions are rappelling down from the ceiling, while in the bottom half, a statue of Shiva sits in a fiery-orange recess.

In the top half of the painting, where we might expect to find godliness and angels, we instead find a devilish, undead creature with antlers whose minions are rappelling down from the ceiling

The biblical story itself is also flipped on its head in Shaw’s interpretation. The original sees Jesus cast out merchants and money lenders who have turned it into a marketplace – Shaw’s iteration seems to use money to cleanse it. The place is awash with gold. While Venusti’s shamefaced merchants huddle together, Shaw’s are lion-headed people adorned with crowns, flouncing around with gold coins shooting from their jaws, in beatific ceremony.

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 1

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 3

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 4

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 5

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 6

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 7

Barrington, Alavro_No horizon, no edge to liquid, 2020, installation view_Photo Tim Bowditch 8

From Shaw, who weaves together different traditions to disturb established hierarchies, to Alvaro Barrington. His ‘A Different World’ series engages a similar gesture (albeit more understated), threading coarse yarn through postcards depicting European landmarks. The opulence of the buildings — The Palais Garnier, for instance, a potent symbol of Paris — is wrapped up, occluded from view. Expropriated wealth expropriated once more.

Engaged in an extended tradition of women’s work through the act of weaving (and further bridling the machismo landmarks by pegging their postcards to a washing line) Barrington undermines the implicit power of European architecture by a humble intervention – quiet and domestic, homely and beyond the home.

From postcards to poetry, the haiku-like simplicity of Hiraki Sawa’s work explores how global movement can co-exist with the domestic. ‘Migration’ (2003) is a hypnagogic video featuring toy-soldier-sized people and animals strolling along radiator pipes, windowsills and taps. There’s a lightness to the juxtaposition and the figures’ flickable scale — perhaps they migrate when the heating comes on? — as well as a more sombre note in the character’s slow but steady progress across humdrum black-and-white door frames and kitchen counters: settings in which you might not expect to find a sense of dislocation and displacement.

There’s a lightness to the juxtaposition and the figures’ flickable scale — perhaps they migrate when the heating comes on?

By bringing together a disparate array of artists working in a diverse range of media, No Horizon, no edge to liquid is itself a cultural hybrid: a space where cultures meet, where ideas cross-pollinate, where links and translations form from work to work. Think of hybridity as dialogue. Hasn’t it always been in conversation that the best ideas arise?