Sculpture In The City 2014
This was a fun assignment, to photograph one of the 14 artworks that is on display in a free exhibition Sculpture in the City, in the City Of London. Death metal band Unfathomable Ruination performed in an airtight, soundproofed small metal cube outside the Gherkin. The band were inaudible to the public but could be felt by the vibrations omitting from the cube.
“This is the first time that João Onofre’s work, Box sized DIE featuring Unfathomable Ruination, 2007 – 2014 has come to London, having toured extensively through Europe at venues including Palais de Tokyo and MACBA. Influenced by Tony Smith’s pioneering minimalist sculpture Die (1962), the steel box serves as a mobile location for performance. In each location the sculpture travels to, Onofre invites a local Death Metal band to play, on this occasion Unfathomable Ruination. The box is soundproofed, determining and restricting the performance’s duration to the length of time in which the oxygen is expended. Outside the cube, viewers observe its strange vibrations, only viewing the band’s entrance and exit to the performance space”.
The brief by the culture section of Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter was to both film and photograph the event – which was slightly tricky. I set up a camera to film both the entrance and exit of the band and whilst they were in the cube I photographed spectators feeling the cube’s vibrations … the dilemma was not knowing how long the band would last in the cube as I needed to be by my film camera when they exited – so I photographed stills for just a couple of minutes, as it was they lasted an impressive 19 minutes 35 seconds!
I decided to convert my images into black & white and to show them without any background noise in between the 2 video clips of the band, I felt it worked well. The photographs were published in the newspaper and the video on their website.
