The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, and Santiago Sierra, Black Flag DCA, Nethergate, September 8-November 25
Twin solo exhibitions opening next week take in overtly political conceptual art, as well as more enigmatic offerings.
In a major coup for DCA, Spanish situationist Santiago Sierra is set to unveil the UK premiere of his latest work, with the Nethergate attraction also staging the Scottish debut of late American artist Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead film trilogy.
Known for the provocative nature of his exploits, Sierra’s track record includes paying a man to live behind a brick wall for 15 days, hiring Iraqi immigrants to don protective clothing and be coated in hardening polyurethane foam, blocking an art gallery’s entrance with a metal barrier on its opening night, and a notorious installation in the shape of a gas chamber created within a former synagogue.
Sierra’s work is underpinned by notions of self-government and the rejection of strict national boundaries, with issues such as immigration, the nature of work and the isolation of economic classes recurrent themes.
His new exhibition, Black Flag, takes the form of an immersive photographic and sound installation documenting two separate ventures he undertook in 2015 to the North and South Poles.
Planting the universal symbol of the anarchist movement — a black flag — at earth’s most extreme points was the objective of both expeditions, and it’s the photos and sound recordings that document Madrid-based Sierra’s attempts that make up his latest project.
Billed as a sharp critique of concepts of territory and nationalism, his solo exhibition at DCA is the 52-year-old’s first in Scotland.
Considered one of the most influential artists of recent times, the irreverent Mike Kelley produced startlingly diverse work covering the likes of performance, installation, painting, video, photography, sound and sculpture, and also left behind a powerful body of writing.
Throughout his career he drew on popular culture and modernist traditions to highlight class and gender issues, as well as taken-for-granted assumptions about normality, criminality and deviance.
At the time of his death in Los Angeles in January 2012 aged 57, Kelley was close to completing his Mobile Homestead project, which is the subject of the trilogy of films being screened at DCA. Conceived as a performance piece, the multi-media event centres around a large-scale replica of his childhood home.
Two of the films chart the journey along Michigan Avenue, which was the scene of increasing racial tensions in the mid-1960s amid the decline of Detroit’s automobile industry, with footage of the bizarre road trip interspersed with interviews with residents in the area.