Last weekend I visited The Wapping Project for the first time. Built in 1890, this extraordinary and beautiful building was originally the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, but is now a restaurant and contemporary art space. Some of the machinery from the original power station is still in situ in the very tempting-looking restaurant, which unfortunately I didn't get chance to sample on this occasion, though I'm looking forward to going back to try it another time. As well as the restaurant, the venue houses the Boiler House - an exhibition/installation space - and an art bookshop housed in a greenhouse,as well as outdoor artworks.

The installation currently in the Boiler House is no less extraordinary than the building itself. Yohji Making Waves is a single-piece, site-specific installation created by fashion designer and artist Yohji Yamamoto, in collaboration with scenographer Masao Nihei. In this work, the cavernous, darkened Boiler House space is flooded with water, and a beautiful, oversized silk wedding dress (an iconic piece taken from the designer's autumn/winter 1998 collection) is suspended above it, reappearing as a ghostly reflection in the dark, rippling waters. The space is lit by a string of bulbs sending glimmering light out across the water, a haunting soundtrack plays, and visitors can take a closer look at the dress by clambering aboard a small boat, which a boatman rows around the flooded gallery at regular intervals.

There's something both mesmeric and meditative about this atmospheric installation. But although there's an eerily beautiful quality to the black depths of the water, and spectral floating dress, there's also something hugely fun and anarchic about the very idea of flooding a gallery and rowing around it in a boat. In this way, as well as being contemplative, this is an enchantingly playful installation: it's little wonder that our fellow gallery visitors were beaming with delight as they hopped aboard the little boat and set off across the water.

The installation is the third element of a series of exhibitions devoted to Yamamoto's work in London this summer: the others, which I haven't had chance to visit as yet, are Yohji's Women, an exhibition of photographs at The Wapping Project Bankside, and of course Yohji Yamamoto, a major solo exhibition at the V&A. However, whether or not you're a fan of Yamamoto, I'd highly recommend visiting this installation: one of the most imaginative and appealing pieces of contemporary art I've seen for some time.

It's surprisingly difficult to find details of the installation online, but it is open daily -  Monday - Friday from 12 noon - 10pm and Saturday-Sunday from 10am. Boat rides take place every 15 minutes. The installation is free to enter but a ticket is required for the boat.

Yohji Making Waves is at the Wapping Project until 10 July 2011.

[Image by Madeline Graham via Flickr used under Creative Commons]

On a chilly New Year's Day, we cycled through the silent streets of the City of London to discover Surround Me: A Song Cycle for the City of London. This series of site-specific sound installations is the Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz's first commission for London, and took us from the banks of the River Thames, down secret medieval alleyways, and through empty city squares.

Some of the locations proved tricky to find, and we later discovered that unfortunately not all the sites were still working. But on the grey first day of the new year, we enjoyed the experience of stumbling upon the melancholy, magical sound of Elizabethan madrigals, resonating through empty streets, blending with the sounds of traffic, birdsong and church bells.

This commission for Artangel takes its inspiration from the City's vocal tradition and the sounds of the past: there is a haunting quality about these melodies, which make oblique or explicit references to loss, disappearance and absence, linking the passage of time to the flowing tide of the river. All at once, History seems acutely present in what Peter Ackroyd  calls 'the teeming silence of the city' or as Iain Sinclair puts it in his video about Surround Me, for Tate Shorts, below, 'time in the city is plural'.

 

Susan Philipsz also speaks about Surround Me in an Artangel Podcast, Memory. Click here to listen.

[Image via Artangel]

Ai Weiwei's new Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation, Sunflower Seeds, is made up of millions of what appear to be sunflower seed husks, but are in fact intricately hand-crafted porcelain imitations. Each seed has been painstakingly sculpted and painted by skilled craftspeople working in small-scale workshops in Jingdezhen, China, before being brought together in this work which explicitly invites us to think more deeply about what it means for something to be 'Made in China' and the related notions of import and export, and cultural or economic exchange.
The artist's original intention for the piece was that the audience would be able to walk across the expanse of seeds, to sit down amongst them, to pick them up and to look at them closely. However, Tate visitors have now been stopped from walking over the seeds because of health and safety concerns: the fear is that Tate staff might be at risk of respiratory problems from continued exposure to the dust created as people walked over them.
Visitors can still look at the seeds from a distance, but there's no doubt that this radically changes the artwork itself. The question is, is this even the same artwork if we can't interact with it in the way the artist intended?

Weiwei is said to be 'disappointed' by the decision, and when I visited, I felt disappointed too. The individual seeds are beautiful in their own right, and the overall vista is pleasingly minimal, but the installation as a whole now feels about as engaging as a large-scale gravel drive. For me, the best thing about the installation was the trail of ghostly footprints across the surface of the sunflower seeds, almost like tracks through snow. They acted as a little reminder that there is more to this artwork than we, for now at least, are able to experience.

[image by SimonDoggett used via Creative Commons]

Artist Pete Dungey's miniature pot-hole gardens are a response to "the problem of surface imperfections on Britan's roads" apparently. Project participation is welcomed...

[All images by Pete Dungey]

I love this new commission for the Barbican's Curve Gallery - a magical sonic art installation created by artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot.

Entering the gallery through a chain curtain, you first pass through a dark space with a series of video projections and buzzing sounds. So far, so conventional. But then, turning the corner, you find yourself within a very different space, where a flock of rather adorable zebra finches are fluttering between a series of sandy islands furnished with different musical instruments: electric guitars, basses, cymbals and microphone stands.

As the birds go about their activities (taking a bird bath in a cymbal or pecking bits of twig from an electric guitar) and move through the space, they create a random soundscape that blends with the tweeting and chirruping of the birds themselves. Charming, uplifting and seriously cute.

The installation is in the Barbican's Curve Gallery until 23 May 2010.

UPDATE (17.03.10) - one of the birds has laid an egg on a guitar! Read the full story here.

[Image (top) by CarolienC on Flickr via Creative Commons]

On a very wet evening last week, I went along to the opening of a new site-specific exhibition, Fourteen Interventions, at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury.

Swedenborg House is an intriguing place in itself: this elegant Bloomsbury listed building is the centre of operations for the Swedenborg Society, established in 1810, whose aim is to translate and publish the works of the idiosyncratic scientist, philosopher and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg. Fourteen Interventions is part of the society's bicentennial celebrations - a series of site specific and site responsive artworks, dispersed throughout the four storey building to celebrate the space, its unique history, its architecture and its artefacts: the artists involved include Jeremy Deller, Olivia Plender, Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan, Bridget Smith. Brian Catling and Iain Sinclair.

At the crowded private view, it was difficult to get a good look at many of the artworks tucked away in unexpected corners of this rambling building, but I did get a chance to explore the installations in the basement store room, where mysterious voices emanated from speakers concealed within archive boxes, and flickering projections of blurred images were glimpsed in half-hidden spaces at the back of shelves.

I was especially interested in the combination of visual artworks with written texts throughout the exhibition: Sinclair's commentaries on unusual and arcane objects from the society's archives underlines the point that in such a unique and atmospheric context, there's only a fine line between everyday object and artwork. In a building like this one, it can be difficult to see where site responsive artistic intervention begins and ends, and what is simply the fabric of the space itself.

Fourteen Interventions will be at Swedenborg House until 5 March.

[Image via The Swedenborg Society]