Tag Archives: art installations

The Sunken Boat and the sea at the Turner in Margate (Kent)

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I HAD NEVER HEARD of the artist Anna Boghiguian (born 1946) until we visited her exhibition at the Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate (Kent). Anna was born in Cairo (Egypt), where she studied political and social sciences at The American University. She also studied fine arts and music at Concordia University in Montreal (Canada). The works on display at Margate until 26 October 2025 are a superb synthesis of both her interests in world affairs and artistic talents.

Anna’s show at the Turner is called “The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories”. It consists of three installations, one in each of three spacious galleries. One gallery contains an installation comprising a set of sandy beaches littered with the remains of wrecked boats and sails along with other flotsam and jetsam. The walls of the room have frames containing images relating to historical and ecological events. Regarding this fascinating and beautifully composed exhibit, the gallery’s website noted that the installation:

“… the centrality of the sea in shaping histories of labour, trade, ecological collapse, and political conflict. It combines sculpture, painting, cut-out figures and sound, inviting reflection on rising sea levels and geopolitical tensions around undersea communication cables.”

Another room has a cluster of cut-outs depicting famous people of the past including Einstein, Gandhi, Queen Victoria, Napoleon, Pythagoras, and many others. Each of the cut-outs are colourfully painted and are suspended from the ceiling by fine threads, and hang above a large black and white chess board. They rotate gently in reaction to movements of the air caused by motions of the viewers.

The third gallery contained an installation that evoked being under the sea. Figures either swimming or drowning are suspended from the high ceiling. The room is lit with a blueish glow that gives the viewer the feeling of being below the sea’s surface. The floor of the gallery is a representation of the seabed, with undersea cables, marine creatures and plants, assorted debris, and other objects one might expect to find there. The lighting was chosen to evoke the reduced illumination that one can imagine exists deep below the sea’s surface. It reminded me a little of the church at Tudely (Kent) whose stained-glass windows by Chagall create the same impression. In this church, Chagall designed the windows to create the impression of being below the sea because the edifice is dedicated to the memory of someone who died by drowning. Unlike the church at Tudely, the installation at the Turner expresses a less specific, more global concern: that of the sea’s ecology at present and in the future.

Words can hardly do justice to the amazing show at Margate. Without doubt, it must be seen to be fully appreciated. The exhibition illustrates that  Anna Boghiguian is a competent and imaginative artist with a great grasp of past and contemporary political and present ecological challenges facing the waters in our seas and oceans. And she knows how to express these matters in imaginative and compelling ways,

Walk the house on London’s South Bank

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DO HO SUH is an artist who was born in South Korea in 1962. He was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Seoul National University, and then later, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. He lived and worked in Seoul, then in New York City, and now in London. So, during his life, he has changed homes several times while moving from place to place. His exhibition that is on show in London’s Tate Modern until 19 October 2025 is called “Walk the House”. The exhibition is his artistic interpretation of what the concept of home means and of his experiences of moving from one residence to another.

A house within a house

Th artist’s works in the exhibition range from sketches, paintings, and sculptures to spectacular three-dimensional installations. Some of the installations can be entered and explored by visitors. In one of them, called “Nest/s”, the artist has stitched together a series of rooms made of translucent cloth that evoke places where he has lived in Seoul, New York, London, and Berlin. Visitors walk along a tunnel from room, thus following in the footsteps of the artist as he changed homes.  Another large installation that can be entered is a large room made of translucent, white polyester. To the walls of this structure, the artist has attached models of appliances and fittings that were in each of the homes he has lived. The items that have been attached have been colour coded: a different colour for each of the places in which he has dwelled. One other thing that particularly appealed to me is a translucent resin model of the house in which he lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Visible within this model there is a model of Suh’s childhood home in Seoul.

The Tate’s web page for this exhibition explained:

“Is home a place, a feeling, or an idea? Suh asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we move through and inhabit the world around us.

With immersive artworks exploring belonging, collectivity and individuality, connection and disconnection, Suh examines the intricate relationship between architecture, space, the body, and the memories and the moments that make us who we are.”

And this does well summarise what can be viewed in this exhibition, which is well worth visiting.

A garden of funkiness in London’s Kensington

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THE SERPENTINE GALLERY rarely puts on exhibitions that can be described as ‘mundane’. It is the most exciting and adventurous public art gallery in London. True to form, its current show (in the South gallery) is both weird and unexpected – actually, quite funky. Called “Emajendat” (i.e., ‘imagine that’), it is on until the 2nd of March 2025. The exhibition or art installations were created by Lauren Halsey, who was born in 1987 in Los Angeles (USA), where she lives and works.

Ms Halsey has created a series of fantasy landscapes that reflect the backyard culture of the part of Los Angeles – South Central – where was brought up and still lives. The exhibition’s leaflet explained that she:

“… has developed a distinct visual language deeply rooted in South Central Los Angeles where her family has lived for generations. Through objects and installations, Halsey archives and remixes the changing signs and symbols of her environment, gathering physical and graphic material from her neighbourhood. In her work Halsey merges past, present and future via her interest in iconography connected to the African diaspora, Black and queer icons and architecture. Halsey cites the collective sonic and visual layering associated with funk music as the blueprint for her approach to making, traversing time and drawing on a wide range of sources.”

 The extraordinary environments she has created in the various spaces within the Serpentine have a humorous dreamlike quality, and at the same time contain her comments on the social culture of Los Angeles. These comments and her message as described in the gallery’s leaflet were lost on me, but I enjoyed the visual impact and creativity of what I saw. From a purely aesthetic point of view, this extraordinary exhibition is like the proverbial ‘breath of fresh air’.