- Venue
- Hayward Gallery
- Location
- London
Whole days as a child can be happily spent in a half-imagined world, where it is possible to fly, or where little people live under beds just out of sight, coming out at night to salvage stray Cheesy Puffs and Blackjacks. Rainy afternoons pass in a flash when presented with a stack of mother’s discarded fashion magazines and a pair of scissors. Old shoe boxes hold vast collections of shells, marbles, foreign coins and other random but captivating paraphernalia. This is the world conjured up by Annette Messager’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London.
The exhibition presents examples of her work from across the last four decades. Her early work explores these themes of childhood using collage, collection, and using everyday materials found around the home to piece together her creations. The Secret Room presents some Collection Albums Messager created while living and working in a small apartment in Paris. Visible only through slits cut into the wall, the viewer feels curiosity which can’t be fully sated, mixed with an illicit thrill of spying.
These themes evolve and become more fantastical in the later rooms, presenting her more recent work. In a dimly lit space, a vast red sheet billows and undulates across the floor, seeming both comforting, but also almost erotic. This is the recreation of one section of the three-part installation, Casino, which Messager was awarded the Lion d’Or prize for at the Venice Biennale in 2005. The whole installation took inspiration from the story of Pinocchio, with this section representing the part of the story when Pinocchio is swallowed whole by a whale.
Messager says, "I like to tell stories. Children’s stories are monstrous. Psychoanalytically, our entire society is encapsulated in fairy tales." Toys and other remnants of childhood are used throughout her work, but she draws on this most effectively on the horrific elements of childhood fantasy in Articulated-Disarticulated, presented here. A room is filled with almost human-like characters created from stuffed toys and cloth. They are all suspended by strings, but also motorised so they rise and fall, jerkily moving in a disturbing manner. Nightmare like, they bring to mind the mutant toys the doll-torturer boy-next-door in Toy Story would have created. Judging by the reaction of children in this room of the exhibition, watching silently with awe, yet an air of complicity, Messager taps back into that secret childhood world in a way that most of us have long ago lost.
