For the Furnace commission, Greenland Street has invited Goshka Macuga to realise her most ambitious installation to date. Macuga's practice explores the boundaries that define exhibition structures and seeks to put the categories of curator and gallery into a new relationship with each other by hosting the work of other artists within her own immersive environments. Her installations and displays question authorship and hierarchies of value inherent within 'High Art'. Artworks are often displayed alongside artefacts, souvenirs, mementos and scrap that she collects, finds, borrows and purchases.

For Greenland Street, Macuga working in collaboration with If-Untitled Architects will create an all encompassing environment based on set designs from the film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Directed in 1919 by Robert Wiene, the film is well know for the brilliance of its set design and set designer Hermann Warm enlisted Walter Reimann and Walter Roehrig, fellow members of Berlin's Der Sturm group, to act as art directors. They created the unprecedented look of the sets, costumes and makeup to reflect the mind of a madman and succeeded in embodying the aesthetic of the Expressionist movement.

Taking inspiration from the films set, Macuga's installation will utilise the dynamic architecture of the Furnace in order to create elevated walkways, a complex of corridors filled with display cabinets, rotating platforms, hidden rooms and anti-chambers, all of which will combine to create an abstracted and distorted landscape.Within this complex and intriging structure, she plans to curate a series of theatrical tableaux, performances and exhibitions of artworks, objects and curiosities many of which will be borrowed from local, regional and national museums.

Audiences will be invited to navigate on, in and around the installation and will be given the option to take a guided tour, where Gallery Assistants will lead groups of up to ten visitors through different journeys, imparting snipets of narrative, based on the immediate environment and the objects displayed within.

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Glossary

  • Curator

    A person who creates exhibitions or who is employed to look after and research museum objects.

  • Design

    The arrangement of elements or details in an artefact or a work of art.

  • Film

    A transparent, flexible plastic material, usually of cellulose acetate or polyester, on which light-sensitive emulsion is coated, or on which an image can be formed by various transfer processes.

  • Installation

    An artwork comprised of many and various elements of miscellaneous materials (see mixed media), light and sound, which is conceived for and occupies an entire space, gallery or site. The viewer can often enter or walk around the installation. Installations may only exist as long as they are installed, but can be re-created in different sites. Installation art emerged in the 1960s out of Environmental Art (works of art which are three-dimensional environments), but it was not until the 1970s that the term came into common use and not until the late 1980s that artists started to specialise in this kind of work, creating a genre of ‘Installation Art’. The term can also be applied to the arrangement of selected art works in an exhibition.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.