NO SHOW MUSEUM

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Untitled, 2006. Semen, lighting. 1st | A

A permanent intervention in Cubitt Gallery in London: Roger Hiorns coated the lighting of the gallery with his own sperm. This is a permanent piece, i.e. until the lighting units fail.

«It’s only when man’s object becomes a human object or objective man that man does not lose himself in that object. This is only possible when it becomes a social object for him and when he himself becomes a social being for himself, just as society becomes a being for him in this object.» (Karl Marx)

«A thin veneer of immediate realityis spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.» (Vladimir Nabokov) Biographical Background: After graduating, Roger Hiorns took a job as a postman in Peckham, which gave him valuable time to think. It also inspired this show at London’s Cubitt Gallery in 2006, one of his earliest solo shows. Allegedly he had no money for materials so he smeared a gallery light with the closest thing to hand: his own semen. “It was about economy, production, claiming the space for the human,” he says. “I would deliver letters to people who had no door because it had been kicked off the week before. I would see people using the lifts as toilets – so actually putting semen on a lightbulb didn’t seem extreme.”

Links

Corvi-Mora gallery | Cubitt gallery | Annett gelink gallery | Further informations 1 | 2

Credits

All reproductions are courtesy by the artist © Roger Hiorns / 2014, ProLitteris, Zurich