“Foster, You’re Dead,” Rirkrit Tiravanija’s third exhibition at Emi Fontana—done in collaboration with architect Neil Logan—is titled after Philip K. Dick’s 1955 science-fiction story about a family who cannot afford a bomb shelter, an item that has become a status symbol in their town. Tiravanija reinterprets Dick’s tale as a macabre children’s game: In one room of the gallery, the artist has placed boxes of jigsaw puzzles on low wooden tables; as participants put together the pieces, they realize that the images they are building are of mushroom clouds. (The number of pieces in each puzzle corresponds to the energy yield, in megatons, of the explosion depicted.) The simplest puzzle, which is made up of only one piece, is perhaps the most difficult to play with, since it shows its disturbing image without mediation. Indeed, when interacting with the puzzles that have many small pieces, the visitors can almost lose themselves in the games’ playful and aesthetic qualities. In another room, visitors settle onto an upholstered seat in a steel water tank with a cutout front—its design resembling that of a 1950s sofa—in front of which plays a video that shows a young boy reading the Dick story. He is around the same age as the story’s Mike Foster, who, owing to peer pressure at school, pushes his father to purchase a bomb shelter. What comes across—in the story and, in turn, in the exhibition—is a strong feeling of fear, not only the specific fears related to the cold war but also an existential fear about the present.
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
