Barbara Kruger’s first solo institutional exhibition in London in 23 years is site-specific to both Serpentine South and within the public realm. Her devotion to visual culture underlines the graphic potency of words, language, typeface and expanse. Frequently revisiting works made previously, she reuses words, phrases or images and translates them into a different medium, context or scale. In recent years, she has reconfigured her 1980s photo-collages as animated video works. Through these ‘replays’, she further explores the power of language and image as part of her continuous investigation into how culture and meaning are constructed. “I try to make work about how we are to one another, and that means how we respect one another, how we detest one another, our adorations, our contempt, the centuries of worship and subjugation, of brutality and kindness,” the American artist says.
Now, at Serpentine South, Kruger is presenting Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You., adapted from precursory exhibitions organised by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition explores contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online through a unique selection of installations, moving image works and soundscapes. The exhibition is curated by the artist, in close collaboration with Natalie Grabowska, curator at large, architecture and site-specific projects at Serpentine.
Video installation ‘Untitled (No Comment)’, 2020, (which makes its UK premier here) combines found video and audio in a dynamic and relentless mix, loaded with snapshot footage from TikTok and Instagram, disrupted by questions, statements and quotes by Voltaire and Kendrick Lamar. Hairstyle tutorials, animated cats, acrobats, blurred-out selfies, installation images of Kruger’s work, and gemstones are remixed, leaving you in a stupor of over consumption, matched with the subliminal potency of power, value, capital and ego it conjures, almost highlighting how we snack on information and visuals around us, as opposed to luxuriating in the moment. It makes me consider the split-second way in which information is reposted on social media, without pause to consider or question true intention or undercurrents.
With an enclosed chamber to the main exhibition space, the work ‘Barbara Kruger, Forever’ shows the artist’s exploration of methods of advertising, frequently using architecture to overwhelm viewers, surrounding them in her installations and imposing a direct address. In this immersive installation covering all the walls and floor of the gallery, Kruger again combines her words with those of others. A quote from George Orwell’s 1984 is installed on the floor, while a work featuring a quote by Virginia Woolf from a 1928 lecture appears on the longest wall. Presented as though looking through a magnifying glass, the first word, ‘YOU’, appears monumental. “Architecture is my first love. I try to spatialise ideas,” she says.
The exhibition also features several ‘replays’ of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s, namely Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987, and Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989. And in addition, there is a public, off-site digital installation set to open March 4 at Outernet Arts on Tottenham Court Road which centres around Kruger’s ‘Silent Writings’ (2009/2024). She also lends her words to the exteriors of a bunch of London’s black cabs.
Here, fashion PR mogul Mandi Lennard catches up with co-curator Natalia Grabowska.
Lennard: “Barbara has a close affinity with London and has shown at Serpentine before.”
Grabowska: “It was a group show called Wall to Wall in 1994 curated by Maureen Paley.”
L: Were you even born then?
G: “I was, I was five (laughs). Then director Julia Peyton-Jones was here (Serpentine), and the show was a group show, and the first room where you have the wraparound here now, that’s also where Barbara presented her work and it was site specific. She had her last institutional solo show in London in 2001 in South London Gallery, and actually her first ever institutional show was at ICA in ’83, Iwona Blazwick was assistant curator on that, so London is such a special place for her, a special city for her and it’s such a welcome return, she’s extremely excited.”
L: “Were you involved in every part of the show – the off-site digital installation ‘Silent Writings 2024’ at Outernet, the merchandise, the taxis?”
G: “Yeah, in a way you know, curators always have to pull everything together, so you know we wanted to extend the project also outside of the gallery works – she’s designed three taxis, and then we’re also working with Outernet which is going to present her work, and as she plays with commas and objects so well, it kind of felt inevitable to also do merchandise. People are so excited about her work, she loves the fact that it functions in different forms and mediums and scales, and the fact it’s on the side of a taxi yet it’s on the wall of a museum.”
L: “What I find staggering is that these pieces feel as fresh and meaningful today, the earlier works don’t feel ‘archival’.”
G: “This is what she said recently, ‘I would love if my work became archaic, if the issues that I raise were no longer there,’ but unfortunately that’s not the case, so that’s why a lot of these works are really evergreen. I was telling her how I am originally from Poland and in the past eight years we had a really right-wing government, and there was a lot of protests on the streets because of women’s rights being taken away from them. There wasn’t a protest that I wouldn’t go to. There were so many people holding ‘My Life is a Battleground’ translated to Polish because that’s been translated into so many languages and was used in so many women’s rights contexts across so many geographies for so many years, that it never, unfortunately, it never gets old. There’s a wallpaper in that room that states ‘Our people are better than your people’ and it goes on to say ‘Our shit smells better, we are clean…’ all these kind of consciously and bias things; her work is never issue-specific, it’s never made in relation to one event or one thing, but it’s always more of an ongoing commentary, it’s so much about the human stubbornness, the biases that we create, even the silences.”
Photography courtesy of Serpentine. ‘Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You.’ is now open at Serpentine South, London and runs until March 17, 2024. ‘Silent Writings, 2024’ at Outernet Arts takes place March 4 to May 20, 2024, on selected Mondays between 6:00am and 11:30pm.
