Overburden

Works in the exhibition

Woodland Cemetery fixture (Rescued and restored), 2019

The first work visitors will encounter in Accelerator’s underground spaces is a light fixture from the Monument hall of the Woodland Cemetery’s Crematorium in Stockholm. The architect Gunnar Asplund worked on the cemetery for 25 years before its inauguration in 1940. This light fixture was recently stolen from the Woodland Crematorium but was found by the police severely damaged when it was on its way to a scrapyard and returned to the Cemeteries Administration. After learning about this story Gaillard suggested to restore and exhibit the lamp – inverting its original position above ground to Accelerator’s subterranean space.

When Asplund designed the fixture in 1939, it was lit with gas. The flame was intended as a ceremonial light, bringing the entrance area’s sculpture group, Resurrection (1928-1941) by John Lundqvist to life. It portrays six bodies rising from the underworld towards the light and a new life. Gaillard has replaced the light source in Asplund’s fixture with a sodium vapor lamp that fills the space with a specific monochromatic amber light that unifies the space.

L’Ange du foyer (Vierte Fassung), 2019

Gaillard’s holographic sculpture L’Ange du foyer (Vierte Fassung) is based on the figure in Max Ernst’s painting L’Angedu foyer from 1937. Ernst saw this figure as an ominous warning against the rise of fascism in Europe; he painted it during the Republicans’ fight against General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In Gaillard’s work, Ernst’s angel is transformed into a digital animation that turns itself inside out. Caught in the blades of an LED fan, this surrealist apparition testifies to Gaillard’s preoccupation with the capacities of destruction within us.

Ocean II Ocean, 2019

When Gaillard visited Accelerator in spring 2019, he was in the last stages of completing the film Ocean II Ocean, which he had been working on for years. The film takes viewers on a pulsating journey from metro stations in Moscow, St Petersburg, Kiev, Bucharest, Tbilisi and Berlin to the sea bed off the east coast of America. In this work different temporalities are at play. Fossilised matter in Moscow’s subway, fixated still in marble for approximately 150 million years are captured with reflections of the flickering light from the speeding trains. These images are intertwined with found footage of New York subway cars being dumped at sea. Between 2001-2010, 2500 decommissioned subway cars from the Metropolitan Transport Authorities were sunk in the Atlantic Ocean to become artificial reefs. In their underwater graves, sharks, manta rays and other sea creatures will inhabit them until these manmade structures will become another layer of sediment.

Following the rising water level in a toilet flush, the journey goes on above ground to the sound of a steel drum orchestra. These instruments originated in Trinidad and Tobago and were traditionally fabricated from discarded oil barrels. Their unique sound is here by Gaillard given an intense alarm-like ringing as a possible echo of the loss of the fossil fuel it once contained.