March 22, 2018 |
Spanning the length of the Duveen galleries, Anthea Hamilton’s latest installation for the annual Tate Britain Commission, ‘The Squash’ feels like walking into the final scene of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Comprising over 7000 brilliant white tiles, there’s something about the contrast of their clinical modernity and neoclassical surroundings that forces the association with that fateful hotel room beyond the infinite. There are even an assortment of monoliths – not the vast levitating kind, but works of art from the Tate’s collection including several from Henry Moore, chosen by Hamilton for their organic forms and colours and positioned atop of her Tetris like podiums.
All this sense of otherworldliness, of being stood inside a computer simulation, comes before you realise that this is in fact a stage, where, with the help of Loewe, Anthea Hamilton has combined performance and sculpture, for a continuous six-month performance of a single character, dressed in a series of vibrant, alien costumes, designed in collaboration with Loewe’s Creative Director Jonathan Anderson. Each element of this bold and immersive installation is partially informed by Hamilton’s interest in found photographs, where the original source has been lost, but here, Hamilton re-purposes them, inviting the performer to explore their own interpretation of the space and image. Performers select their costume of choice, depending on the image and their chosen interpretation, meaning the outfits take on an anthropomorphic quality as each individual presentation reflects the chosen character, as they inhabit Anthea’s installation.
