Anish Kapoor at The MCA, Sydney
A selfie takers delight, or a surreal trip of perspective and space? Carol Bowditch went to Anish Kapoor’s much hyped exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney to find out what all the fuss was about.
Indian born-Brit artist Anish Kapoor, brought a collection of his mystifying works and plonked them into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The collection consists of sculptures that play with ideas of reflection and space. Objects that seem flat are round, round objects appear flat from a different angles, and sometimes I had no idea what the hell was going on.
Before you enter the exhibition Kapoor’s work delights passers by with his gigantic Sky Mirror. It that does as the title implies, the surrounds of the large mirror are reflected on a stunning, massive scale. Once you’re in the exhibition, you enter an entire room filled with red wax, it has a churning motor attached, and with each rotation, it molds the wax into a solid flat disk, the smell in the room is quite potent because there is just so much dang wax everywhere.
On the third floor, the main pieces of Kapoor’s visiting collection reside. Hidden behind the main area of the collection the viewer is taken into a dark, empty void. A massive sandstone entrance in a wall which is covered in black pigment. It’s hollow and dark, it echoes, it’s quiet and calm. I visited this little hole in the wall three times on my visit, it was that intriguing, I just wanted to understand it, but failed to do so and simply got lost in the work.
Memory, a enormous 24 ton steel barrel-like sculpture (that painstakingly had to be reconstructed within the gallery), takes a large presence with a room to itself on the upper floor. And then of course, there are the range of mirrors. It’s funny to see people of all ages taking selfies in Kapoor’s varied collection of image contorting mirrors. On my visit it seemed that all the ladies were flocking to the mirror that reflected a long and lean illusion of themselves. Ah, vanity.
The exhibition is an absolute trip, a surreal experience that highly exceeded my expectations of it being a place to take a few #nofilter worthy Instagram snaps. The exhibition retires on April 1 (and is open on the public holidays), so you have the whole weekend to check it out in it’s last few days. For more information, check out the Museum of Contemporary Art’s website.
Words by Carol Bowditch.
