- Venue
- la Biennale di Venezia
- Location
Cropping out of a darker recess of the Academia district of Venice is Callum Morton's ‘Valhalla'; a three-quarter scale model of the artist's former home which rests uneasily in the courtyard of the Palazzo Zenobio. The building that inspired this sculpture was the Morton family's dream home designed by his architect father, and which like so many other flat-roofed concrete nods to Modernism, has recently succumbed to external forces and been ground to dust. Although only a temporary addition to the city's sinking architecture, the graffiti punctured and battle worn model of ‘Valhalla' has permanence as a remain, like a set piece backdrop to an enduring Mad Max style apocalypse. The building's once harmonious agreement of form and function has descended into a replicated ruin of polystyrene and corrugated plastic.
It isn't clear at first if the building can or should be entered. A seemingly out of place plastic door greets those who inspect, letting out a striking billow of air-conditioned refrigeration when opened, and sealing a flawless marble floored lobby area when closed. This is the building's only room, and sunk into a single wall are three miniature sets of stainless steel elevator doors that shimmer with the harsh artificiality of the recessed spotlights. The disarming sensate experience of scale and chill is further amplified with the background hum of fey karaoke music versions of rock classics such as the Stones' ‘Jumping Jack Flash', creating a muzak playlist that chimes play along meekly until the sound of booming thunder and flickering screams take over when the elevator button is pressed. Whereas the outside looks like a bomb site, the inside is still in the midst of the threat of destruction and an ominous expectation follows every quake of sound and light. The polished interior of this remnant is contained forever to live out a recurring awareness of peril.
The material behind this work is an intensely personal relationship with a building and its memory, and by recreating it in a vernacular that touches upon media images of war torn cities, terrorism, and natural disasters, the work fuses the artist's private loss with a public spectacle. By entitling the piece ‘Valhalla', which in Scandinavian Mythology is the hall where those who were slain in battle would feast for eternity, Morton is perhaps suggesting that the sense of loss that this building represents is fundamentally aligned with all other losses, and all other objects that have become testaments because of their scarring or destruction. The Vikings of Valhalla feast eternally because their lives were lost, and because the desire for their memory to live on created a monument to contain them. Morton's ‘Valhalla' is simultaneously looped in a blockbuster catastrophe movie and a personal bereavement, as whatever public or private loss we may have to face, its significance becomes monumental when its memory is trawled from an overlapping pool of language objects.
