Heaven and Earth
Artist Yayoi Kusama’s interactive Obliteration Room begins as an entirely white space, furnished as a monochrome living room, which people are then invited to ‘obliterate’ with multi-coloured stickers.
Over the course of a few weeks the room was transformed from a blank canvas into an explosion of colour, with thousands of spots stuck over every available surface.
TateShots produced this time-lapse video of the Obliteration Room covering the first few weeks of its presentation at Tate Modern in 2012. It was first conceived as a project for children, and was first staged at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2002.
The idea for “Plegaria Muda,” which includes blades of grass rising through wooden tables, came after Doris Salcedo spent time in Los Angeles with women who had lost children to gang wars.
Politically speaking, you don’t have to be a house to be haunted. All you need to be is someone who keeps an eye on the news; who pays attention to loss through violence; and feels a personal stake in that loss, as if it were happening to people you know and care about, to people who live in your home.
Doris Salcedo’s 2003 Istanbul Installation « Inhabitat – Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building
Whether capturing Frida Kahlo’s house, wild dogs in India or the Seri people in Mexico’s Sonara desert, Graciela Iturbide presents the world in black in white – or as she describes it, as “an abstraction of the mind.”
Travelling with her camera every day and often living with her subjects for months, Iturbide says that her process is similar to that of a travel photographer, except that she only shoots “what surprises and provokes an emotion that I want to capture.”