Curated by Andrea Lissoni
The industrial-noir aesthetic of Micol Assäel’s work is by turns Cold War and futuristic, yet there is always more than meets the eye: The Italian-born artist typically makes the viewer’s body a conduit between this visible realm and hidden forces such as electricity, magnetism, and coldness. In addition to one new work resulting from experiments in the run-up to the show, this survey will bring together four of the artist’s installations, ranging from Untitled, 2003, a room in which iron furniture is suspended above occasionally sparking electric cables, to Mindfall, 2004–2007 , in which the smell of burning gasoline complements the intense noise produced by twenty-one intermittently running motors. An accomplice to the unsettling appeal of such end-times vignettes is fear—a fear not only that our technological society could go wrong, but that it already has.
