All About Chairs
(July – October 2003)

As part of All About Chairs, twenty photographers and artists working with photography as their medium were given a common task to make a single narrative image, square format, colour, including within it a white chair: the SIM chair designed by Jasper Morrison.

The commissioned photographers were:
Sheyi Antony Banks, Leon Chew, Jean-Philippe Defaut, Julia Dogra-Brazell, Daniel Eatock & Sam Solhaug, Annabel Elgar, Philipp Ebeling, Adam Green, Nicholas Hughes, Tea Mäkipää, Peter Marlow, Gilbert McCarragher, Marta Michalowska, Stephen Morgan, Sue Parkhill, Paul Quinn, David Ripley, Anna Schori, Eva Stenram, and Danny Treacy.

Five visual artists were given a common task to make a new work, using forty white chairs, one day, two technicians and a lighting designer, all in response to the Boiler House of the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station. Jane Prophet suspended 40 chairs in a grid from the 8m ceiling, counter weighted with buckets of water, also aligned in neat rows that corresponded to the chairs above them. Each bucket siphoned water at different rates and during the one week exhibit chairs fell from the ceiling to the floor at different moments, disrupting the grid as they landed.

Sometimes the longing for death determines life and an investigation into suicide is a simultaneous question about the meaning of life. The spectacular spatial installation Expert, is a visualisation of one of the most shocking human experiences — suicide — and confronts the unprotected gallery visitor, uncompromisingly and disarmingly, with his own feelings of guilt, despair, the desire for sensation and empathy. Ready for communication with the visitor as he enters — via eye contact, or by speaking —, an apparently lifeless body hangs (or rather sits on a swinglike construction) above the audience within the darkened exhibition space during the gallery’s opening hours.

Around a million people world-wide kill themselves each year; the European country with the highest suicide rate is Tea Mäkipää’s home country, Finland. In the European cultural sphere, suicide is regarded as taboo, as the sabotage of all valid norms, although it also embodies the most fundamental of human rights; it is something genuinely human — a simultaneous curse and blessing. But death has also become a leitmotif of popular culture. Artists and poets kill themselves five times more often than average, perhaps because their world is based on fundamental debate concerning their own existence — but another reason may be their dissatisfying social and socio-economic status.