A Visit to the Hayward Gallery

Yesterday I visited the Hayward Gallery. It was a nice experience. To be honest most of the times I find myself extremely board in the gallery spaces and this is a reason why I never comment about visits like that. But this time I have to admit that the exhibitions attracted my attention.

The exhibitions where two. The first one was Annette Messenger's : The Messengers and was an overview of her work - from drawings to big sculptural installations- of the past 15 years. What amazed me in this exhibition was the use of the materials and the mechanics of some of the installations and the fact that I found that they were working very nice with the space given to them. 

The second one was The Russian Linesman curated by Mark Wallinger. Honestly this one is one of the exhibitions that you hear many good things about and I personally can not understand the reason why. I found the most of it indifferent. The curation was clever in a way, but for a reason I wanted to run away. Of course maybe this was part of the idea....! Anyway, only reason why I spent more than half an hour in this exhibition was one of the artworks, witch was the main reason why I visited the Hayward from the begging, the Mark Wallinger Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, 2001( the one you can see in the photograph). This was a Tardis (if anyone is familiar with the sci-fi BBC series Doctor Who will understand what a Tardis is...) made from reflective material. As at this point I am extremely interested in the use of reflective materials and the optical illusion they create to the spectator an in the same time as I am a big fun of sci-fi anything, I spent lots of time observing the art work. My conclusion about it was that is was not working well with the space. The illusion was nice but the wooden floor under it was not helping at all... at least for me and my perception of the usage of reflective materials in a space... maybe the artists intentions was fulfilled. Nevertheless it is nice to observe how each artist can use the same material.... Let's see how I am going to use it now!