The project, entitled Gallery of Lost Art, has been curated by Tate in partnership with Channel 4 and produced by ISO, the studio team behind Central Station.
The interactive website uses essays, images, sound-bites and blogs to explore the histories behind stolen, destroyed, ephemeral or discarded works such as Bas Jan Ader’s unfinished performance In Search of the Miraculous, Eva Hesse’s collapsed latex sculpture Sans III and Rachel Whiteread’s demolished cast concrete House. The site design is based on stark, aerial photographs of warehouse-like spaces, reminiscent of the sound-stage sets in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. Users navigate these virtual stores to an eerie soundtrack of electronic tones, to recover information about the lost works.
Jane Burton is Head of Content and Creative Director at Tate Media: “The Gallery of Lost Art is a ghost museum, a place of shadows and traces. It could only ever exist virtually. The challenge was to come up with a way of showcasing these artworks and telling their stories, when, in many cases, poor-quality images are all we have left of them.”
The exhibition will be online for exactly one year – a countdown bar on the site’s footer emphasises its temporality. With a blog site running concurrently, and opportunities to interact via Facebook and Twitter, the Gallery of Lost Art aims to provide a lively platform for discussion and commentary on the subject of loss within art – albeit a fleeting one.
galleryoflostart.com
facebook.com/GalleryOfLostArt
twitter.com/GalleryLostArt
