Ludovic Duchateau. In Dreamland, 2016; installation view, A Stark Project, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Artist and A Stark Project. Photo: Hillary Goidell.

French sculptor Ludovic Duchâteau’s first solo show in the U.S., In Dreamland at Berkeley’s A Stark Project, is a polished articulation of his dystopian obsessions, which previously found homes in miniature scenes of domestic life cleverly ensconced inside otherwise ordinary-seeming briefcases and among tentacular silicon sculptures engineered with e-waste. Originally a game programmer, Duchâteau abandoned digital media at the height of the first internet bubble in favor of working with a broader variety of materials [1]. The result is particularly striking, evidenced by the ominous installation, In Dreamland.

In the life-size installation featuring epoxy resin and aluminum wire (among other materials), a boy inside a black tarp has fallen asleep reading a famous graphic novel, Akira (set in “Neo-Tokyo” in the aftermath of World War III). The science-fiction titles that are scattered around his makeshift campsite complete the post-apocalyptic literary symbolism. Next to the boy, a cryptic life form emerges from the tent, its gigantic tendrils scouting the empty terrain; this massive, encroaching root system may be a projection of the sleeping boy’s imagination, or perhaps it is all too real—a slithering alien creature seeking to occupy an already ravaged world and replace the frail remnants of a depleted humanity. Either way, viewers are confronted with a heart-stopping scene that belies the pacifying title of the work.

The nightmarish quality of the horrifying habitat is transfixing, in the subliminally deranging manner of a bad accident that is glimpsed, then gone, leaving only a sentiment of cognitive dissonance and a disquieting aftertaste. The blackened radio flyer wagon that lingers at the periphery of the installation adds to the dread. In this sprawling, lifelike piece, Duchâteau reverses the usual dynamic of his smaller, more fastidious works, in which the blissful veneer of domesticity only hints at macabre truths coursing beneath the surface. Here, the unnerving effect of a mutated appendage snaking stealthily out of the boy’s exposed redoubt is the first thing viewers see. But closer examination reveals the relaxed position of the sleeping child, and the possibility that we are, in fact, worlds removed from an apocalyptic reality, inhabiting nothing more than a sinuous, ensnaring dreamland.

Ludovic Duchâteau: In Dreamland is on view through January 15, 2017.

Noah Sudarsky is the Project Manager at the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley. His art coverage has been featured in New York Press, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Whitewall Magazine of Contemporary Art, and The Onion.

[1] Conversation with the artist.

Sun Xun. Mythological Time, 2016 (installation view); Two-channel color HD animated video projection with sound and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Xun, Photo: David Heald.

The exhibition opens with Sun Xun’s Mythological Time, a site-specific installation that weaves visual motifs—a dragon, an opera dancer, a one-winged chunk of coal—into a modern day cave painting. The magnificently drawn mural paintings and animated film use visual techniques taken from the caves of Lascaux and traditional Chinese landscape scrolls to tell a story of the life and death of a coal town.

The symbolism could not be clearer—in one scene, a towering statue of Mao Zedong rises above the coal town. In the next scene, the Mao statue shrinks in the shadow of an exponentially larger monument to Uncle Sam. Here, global capital proves more powerful and unstoppable than even the Communist state. But though Sun’s story is ominous, the storytelling itself suggests a sly playfulness. Sun’s swift lines morph from a phrase of calligraphy into a sinuous dragon and then into a lithe opera dancer in the span of a few seconds, too quick for the slow-moving institutions to apprehend.

Sun Xun. Mythological Time, 2016 (detail); Two-channel color HD animated video projection with sound and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Xun, Photo: David Heald.

If Mythological Time tells of an industrial dystopia, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself warns of a mechanical one. A large robotic arm flings red paint within a transparent cube. As the exhibition progresses, the paint splatters and dries on the walls, turning brown like dried blood. The robot, programmed to contain the paint within a certain circumference against its natural inclination to flow outward, speaks to fears that skilled labor is increasingly being replaced by machines, and offers a critique of the popularization of factory-scale art production. Can’t Help Myself presents a world in which humans are superfluous, and blood and sinews are replaced by circuits and steel.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Can’t Help Myself, 2016; Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Photo: David Heald.

Perhaps the most explicitly apocalyptic work of the exhibition is Tsang Kin-Wah’s video installation, In The End Is The Word. A quiet harbor gradually fills with ships, jockeying for position like pieces in the Hasbro game Battleship. Tensions heighten as the harbor grows more crowded, noisy, and polluted, until finally a cathartic rush of words—phrases from Derrida, Nietzsche, Sartre, and others—come streaming down, clearing the screen. The moment is a gleeful apocalypse, like the orchestral Guy Fawkes Day explosion in the Wachowski Brothers’s V is for Vendetta or the Biblical flood. There is hope that by clearing away the old system, the ground is cleared for something better. The work ends with a single whale swimming in the bay, spouting mist into the sky.

Tsang Kin-Wah. In The End Is The Word, 2016 (detail); Six-channel video installation, with sound. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Tsang Kin-Wah.

Not all the works in Tales of Our Time are doom and gloom. Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, an installation by the Yangjiang Group, responds to contemporary anxieties not by heightening them, but by offering a haven in the form of an invitation to tea. The artists group installed a miniature tea garden around the gallery, set a table, and invite visitors to take their blood pressure before and after entering the installation.

The remaining works vary in quality. Zhou Tao’s Land of the Throat, a two-channel video that intersperses footage of factories with images of wildlife, struggles to find a unique perspective. Kan Xuan’s Kū Lüè Er, an installation consisting primarily of landscape photos taken on a mobile camera, seems like an afterthought for the actual work—a project proposal for a five-month research trip to Central Asia.

Chia-En Jao. Taxi, 2016 (detail); Color UHD video with sound. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Chia-En Jao.

Chia-En Jao’s Arms no. 31, a tapestry that represents Taiwan’s  multi-faceted identity through a coat of arms woven from textiles from factories across the island, presents a narrative of a national identity ready-made for the United Nations. However, Jao’s technically unremarkable documentary Taxi, in which he simply gets into taxis and talks with his drivers, presents a quiet challenge to the curatorial project. The artists in Tales of Our Times provoke common anxieties of the international elite—climate change, AI takeovers, appeals to “mindfulness”—in their narrative and conceptual works because they belong to it. The “Our” in the exhibition title, as global as it is, is exclusive. Only Jao, who brings Guggenheim visitors into Taipei taxis, invites others—his drivers—to tell their tales of the time.

Tales of Our Time is on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 10, 2017.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

However, due in part to the overwhelming volume of visual information to take in, the details take time to understand. And so it isn’t obvious at first glance that this is a completely constructed ruin. These collapsing structures aren’t the result of neglect or misfortune, but facades made from a lot of cardboard, tape, and paint. The tubes that cross through the space, along with the hundreds of bricks, collapsing flooring, suspended walls, and I-beams, are all constructed of cardboard, while hundreds of meters of knotted tan packing tape adorn the installation. Most of the cardboard is sprayed dark gray, but some areas have an additional white-painted brick motif. The grayness of the installation reinforces the overall bleakness of the collapsing environment, but the flatness of tone signals that this is an entirely invented space. It’s exactly the opposite of a slick Hollywood movie facade that looks real from a specific distance. It has more the light feel of a school fete in which the students have spent a week constructing a spooky funhouse out of available materials—albeit one that’s super-sized. It’s intentionally crude and still easily understood. The decay here is created, and it is clearly about facsimile.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

The addition of used and discarded items such as toilets, portable oil-filled radiators, plastic deck chairs, army netting, and broken pressboard storage units give the show a postapocalyptic element. Copious amounts of silver ducting, strewn from all directions across the space in the same manner as half-hung bunting, complete the scene. Although these items make up less than fifteen percent of the installation, the used quality greatly contrasts with the painted cardboard and tape, and gives the installation the feeling that the space was once occupied. The human element pushes the coolness of the facsimile into something recognizably familiar and personal; this straddling of facsimile and the actual is the In-Between that gives the show its title. The moment in which a viewer could resolve the dichotomy between the two is the moment when the suspension of disbelief occurs and fantasy supersedes Hirschhorn’s construct. In juxtaposing the constructed facsimile with discarded items, Hirschhorn offers viewers the space to project their own specific fantasy of apocalyptic desire onto the artwork.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Mark Blower.

For all of its projected menace, the show is a lot of fun to walk through. There is a sense of playfulness in its manic construction that isn’t usually seen in a Hirschhorn exhibition. In the time it took me to view the show, three different sets of children came through, and separately each found great joy in counting the toilets. These kids immediately understood the element of play that is often lost in the grandiosity of Hirschhorn’s heavy-handed gestures. In this case, the intimate scale of the South London Gallery makes it possible to see the lighter aspects of wonder in the work. While large enough for Hirschhorn to be his maximalist self, the installation reveals the subtler detail of his practice that would be missed in a larger space. Within this scale, children and adults alike connect to the work and engage in their particular reveries. Hirschhorn’s mastery isn’t with craft or object making, but he infuses a sense of wonder and play into his installation that enables the viewer to project past the actual physicality of the work. So the facsimile is two-fold: the installation’s construction of ruin, and the viewer’s projection. Even with this realization, it’s still incredibly hard to shake one’s own projection of apocalypse and only consider what is physically present.

Thomas Hirschhorn: In-Between is on view at South London Gallery through September 13, 2015.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (010), 20inx14.75in, 2010, Ink, Acrylic, Watercolor and Gouache on Paper

Due to the ubiquity of image and video today, we have become accustomed to witnessing disasters, both man made and natural, unfold in front of our very eyes. Because of the easy access of imagery and news media, it seems as if these disasters are growing at an exponential rate and are perhaps starting to spiral out of control. The recent onslaught of crisis’, be it economical, environmental or social,  has created a permeating feeling that we are now living in a highly uncertain time and the normals of stability are starting to slip away. This feeling has prompted many artists to create narratives that explore what happens when all of these disasters come together and finally threaten human life as we know it. However, it is too often that work in this vein focuses on the actual apocalyptic event, the spectacle, without much attention being placed on what happens to the world when there is only the scare of past human presence remaining.

The paintings and collages of Alex Lukas are centered on the days that take place after the “event”. The works offer a window to the future, a time that is oddly quiet, but that would look dismal to any human. In a new exhibition titled, These Are the Days of Miracle and Wonder, currently on view at the up and coming Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, Lukas continues to explore the notion of looking to the future for information about the present, as well as documenting what it would be like to view a post-human world. The artist recently met Seth Curcio, founder and editor for DailyServing, at the gallery to discuss what events led to the moments depicted in his recent works, the time and place of these catastrophes, and what it feels like to view actual disaster images, which are currently taking place in the world.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (015), 18.875inx11in, 2010, Ink, Acrylic and Silk Screen on Book Page

Seth Curcio: The paintings that you have been creating in recent years depict a type of forgotten land that is in the process of being reclaimed by nature. Since it isn’t always clear, I’d like to get your thoughts on the possible events that led up to the quieter moments featured in your recent works?

Alex Lukas: The lack of a clear depiction of what came before is obviously very intentional. I know that the natural question raised by any depiction of “after” – which is how I think of these pieces- is “what happened?” And, that is a question that isn’t answered in the paintings. I’m interested in the idea of the confusion that will inevitably come “after” whatever has happened, be it war or disease or flooding, and how that confusion might grow with time. I imagine that the witnesses (if there are any) to the scenes depicted in these paintings might not have a clear idea of what has happened either. I think, given the breakdown of modern communications, rumors and false information will circulate and change over time – or there might be no information at all, no record of “the event” – yet it hangs over everything. I think of this sensation a little like an echo – there was a violent event, a loud clap of thunder, a tremendous bag, and in the silence afterward your ears are left ringing – even if you forget the sound, you can still hear it in the silence afterward.

Alex Lukas, Untitled (029), 2010, 42in x 90in, Ink, Acrylic, Gouache, Watercolor and Silk Screen on Paper

SC: The concepts of time and place are also interesting elements in your work. It is often difficult to discern if your scenes depict the aftermath of one catastrophic event, which is affecting several locations at once, or if we are seeing several different disasters that take place over a much longer period of time. Since time and place are so ambiguous in your work, how do you feel that you relate to these concepts and how do you feel they affect the viewer’s perception?

AL: I think of these paintings as scenes in a future – but they are depictions that reveal the past, they are focused on an after. In the paintings, this unknown “event” that I was talking about is something that has already happened, yet for us this event is still ahead – which makes for a very ambiguous time line. The locations for the drawings are created, composited or altered and generally generic, so they don’t reflect a precise place – they exist without firm landmarks that might give a clue as to where or when these places are (the tense is confusing – trying to determine where a location is from the perspective of the future looking back, but in our real time line, back is still forward). This ambiguity continues with some of the flooded cityscapes. Because I am using dated source materials, there are buildings that have now been altered or demolished or renovated, but here they stand as they were in the past, but again, they are in a future. All of this I hope leaves the viewer a little confused as to when the events happened, and it is with that sense of confusion that I hope people react to the scene.

Exhibition Installation

SC: It seems that there has been exponential growth with both man made and natural disasters happening in the world recently. The ubiquity of disaster related images and videos certainly make this growth seem more apparent. How do you feel when you see actual images of disasters that threaten life as we know it, such the events of Katrina or the recent oil crisis in the Gulf? It must seem strange after working on these images in your studio all day to view images of actual events, which are strikingly similar to your paintings.

AL: I have been making these drawings since just before Katrina, and it was a very odd sensation to see images similar to what I’ve been drawing on television. Obviously it is a little unsettling, and it feels somehow wrong to draw inspiration from the suffering of others, (I’m always worried it will seem exploitative) but the political implications of these events I think are important and worth of investigation. The fact that we are seeing the second destruction of the Louisiana coast in the past five years, it speaks to the fragility of our government and the system of safety nets that we have set up for ourselves as a society. I think we have witnessed how events can easily spin out of our control – and what happens if we cannot be brought back from the brink? One of the interesting ideas that was mentioned right after Katrina, I don’t remember who said it, but you couldn’t call 911, and that is such a staple of our society, being able to get help when needed. So what happens when the police leave or are unavailable? What happens when hospitals no longer accept patients or are no longer able to treat those already in their care? (There was an amazing, heartbreaking story in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a while back by Sheri Fink about this situation during the aftermath of Katrina). This sense of isolation really interests me, the idea that there might be a day when help will not come, and then what? It all falls apart. I’m interested in exploring what specifics will bring us to this point.

These Are The Days of Miracle and Wonder will be on view at Gurerro Gallery in San Francisco until June 3rd, 2010.