EVA GRUBINGER

Dark Matter

13 SEPTEMBER 2003 - 30 NOVEMBER 2003
 

Dark Matter is the culmination of the artist’s nine-month residency at BALTIC and comprises five large scale sculptures in wood – all replicas of familiar forma of industrial, military and urban architecture. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a giant headset, which plays a soundtrack of abstract electronic noise specially created by sound artist Curd Duca. Together with the other pieces in the exhibition) a control tower, a cooling tower, a nuclear reactor and a high-rise block), the headset is suggestive of surveillance and undercover operations, as well as making reference to the rapidly-growing call centre industry of the North East.

Grubinger is interested in the idea of fear or anxiety as a driving force in modern society: how, in a media driven culture, we are constantly bombarded with information, whilst at the same time having a sense that the most important facts are somehow concealed from us. The feeling of paranoia that this can evoke is reinforced by the knowledge that, in the age of the security camera, our every move may be under surveillance by an unseen but omnipresent observer.

Dark Matter (which takes its name from the astronomical term for the hidden matter which makes up most of the universe) hints at covert forces and systems at work in society which questions our role as unwitting participants within them.

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