- Venue
- Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art
- Location
- London
The Heygate Estate is a run down area near Elephant and Castle in London that, besides being the moody backdrop to films such as Harry Brown, Attack the Block and soon to be released World War Z is also notable for the giant letters NOW HERE on the fire escapes. This now failed example of neo brutalist utopia is currently undergoing protracted demolition process due to the amount of asbestos present in the buildings. At once a literal ‘nowhere’ place of urban decay and empty sprawling walkways after the compulsory eviction of all 3,000 residents there is also the defiant character of the residents who fought to stay there amidst the plans for regeneration which would have given rise to 79 social units from a total of 2535 units and is the brutal reality of the here and now. As Nuur himself states: ‘Many of my pieces begin with an object or an idea that irritates me.’ It’s a particularly irritating story that was triggered in my memory as the piece Untitled (2006-8) featuring a light box construction with the words HERE and THERE lit up to guide my way into an exhibition featuring other transformative treasures.
There’s a gentle nod to phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty as the exhibition explores the associations of the power of memory in the role of the sensual and the shifting, blurring boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity and the tactility and transformative property of plastic material.
In the first room sits a series of microscope like objects on a plain white shelf. For these are the Days (2004/13) appears like an assemblage of throwaway sculptures but on closer inspection reveal a literal inner world as the viewer peers down a lens opening which reveals a kaleidoscopic cave of treasures. On peering in to the leftmost sculpture there appears to be a figure in a white room and one begins to wonder for a moment if we too are also being watched as the ‘intermodule’ conceptual hole in the far wall connects the viewer in this space to the next.
In Star/Ting/Point (2007/13), a click-whirr-buzz signals a projector transitioning slides onto the base of an overturned commercial metal dustbin, it’s clean white painted surface is transformed from split seconds of clean, to dirty textures and patterns which seem to alter the viewers perception of what is generally considered a fairly disgusting everyday object with all its smells and slimy textures – into one of contemplation as the textures and sensual data coalesce to form what are in effect beautiful abstractions of the day to day throwaway.
On the wall opposite, the work From the Eyecodex of the Monochrome Studies (study 92 – 95) appears to show a wall covered up with what appears to be marker pen scrawled across an orange wall. Visually, the wall bears a striking relation to the book cover of Pae White’s book Material Matters from her 2010 show at The Power Plant gallery in Ontario and who like Nuur also plays with material and texture. Hints of orange burst through the wall and the viewer is left with a sense of wonder at what the substance is and how (when seen from the wall next door) the glow appear like stars in the night sky, questioning one’s own perspective of the foreground and the background and something that lies somewhere in between – like an auto-stereogram that reveals a conceptual truth. Which neatly ties into Broken Circle (2011) where a depiction of an eclipse in neon is the precise moment when both sun and moon appear ‘visible’ and invisible at the same point in time.
In the second room the formal elements of expressive painting appears to be broken down into its constituent parts of stroke/gesture, concept and colour selection as the video reveals that the canvasses pick up the smoke particles from a smoke bomb. This work was reminiscent of the work of Simon Dybbroe Moller’s Atlas (2010) and Emperor series both of which employ the separation of texture and colour and appears to mock the heroic gesture as the wallpaper paste (or smoke in Nuur’s work) solidifies an invisible everyday medium to reveal the residual gesture of an everyday gestural act. Aside from the rather bog standard double take optical illusions present in works such as Untitled (2004 – 2011) which depicts a levitating food can tied to a chair, the manipulation of material forms continues on the top floor with the emergency blanket piece of NOT LIKE A PIECE OF PIE BUT LIKE ROPE IN A NET (2008 – 2010) that resembles a gold leaf mural and there are hints of Canadian artist David Spriggs technique in the scraped mirror piece Untitled (2013) which appears almost holographic due to its layered construction.
Recaptured from the Collective (2013) presents a dot (presumably the irritable full stop of Where you end and I begin) blotted through a stack of papers that gradually begins to reveal its secret as the layers of the onion are peeled apart. A correlation begins to be drawn in the idea of layering in the stack of newspapers weighed down by a stone, the cross sections of glass and ink blots that appear to inform the shapes of the laser cut styrofoam models. Whether this was the final intention of the artist or not, I felt the revelatory buzz of Keyser Soze.
