Hayward gallery, LondonAnimated, trembling, majestic, fake, doomed, plastic, printed, dying and dead trees. They´re all there in this pleasurable but frustrating exhibition that would benefit from focusing on humans and our stupidity tooRunning the entire width of one floor at London´s Hayward gallery is a six-screen video which depicts, at about life size, a spruce tree swaying in the breeze in Finland. To accommodate its scale, the tree is projected horizontally, and at its foot stands the artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila, in a blue parka, dwarfed by the spreading conifer. The six projected sections of the tree tremble and sway out of sync with one another, adding to a growing sense of majestic befuddlement. You can´t take it in all at once, any more than you could if you stood before the real thing. Distantly, I hear the branches soughing and faint birdsong. Titled Horizontal - Vaakasuora, it makes you look and look some more.Horizontal - Vaakasuora is one of the highlights of Among the Trees, an exhibition that fills the Hayward with a knotty tangle of romanticism, wood carving and trunk splitting, fake trees and real trees, doomed trees and casts of trees, dead trees, trees that never lived and trees that have survived for thousands of years. Pascale Marthine Tayou´s tree bears a blossom of colourful plastic bags which rustle in the draft from the gallery´s air conditioning, while Simryn Gill´s photographs of mangroves in the Straits of Malacca focus on the plastic detritus, lost fishing gear and clothing that festoon the branches in a horrible bunting on the edge of one of the world´s busiest shipping lanes. Continue reading...
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