Emily LaBarge
Inheritance of things past: a show of object groupings by the collaborators explores the gray areas of UK history.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Fly Tip, 2024.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land,
Spike Island, 133 Cumberland Road, Bristol, United Kingdom,
through January 19, 2025
• • •
It’s true what they say: the land, it is gray and unpleasant. Perhaps (though arguable, in this gray, gray land, with its gray, gray history) no more so than in the last two years, during which Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane have collaborated for the first time to produce a series of works about their adopted home of the United Kingdom. The end of a morally bankrupt Conservative government, fiscal nightmares, needless deaths, police corruption, racist scaremongering, socialite scandals, demonizing of the working classes, anti-European sentiment, and . . . but wait, what’s that you say—plus ça change?
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Job Lot, late 1700s–2024.
A confusing place, timeless even, but what (crumbling, former, last-days, choose-your-adjective) empire isn’t? I don’t know if there is a famous quotation about how much easier it is to really see a place, a nation, a land, if you aren’t from there, but let’s say it is. Or rather, easier to recognize its familiar aspects as foreign—constructed, arbitrary, oddities ripe for challenge and change. Wending through the circuitous, high-vaulted rooms of Spike Island, a former tea factory in Bristol’s historic dockyards, Al-Maria and Ourahmane have assembled austere groupings of objects, made and found, that sketch out some of the negative space—the “gray areas,” if you will—that supports the vexed and vexing landscape of Old Blighty past and present.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Job Lot, late 1700s–2024 (detail).
At the center of the center of the exhibition is a diptych of thwarted inheritance—absences, paper trails, empty vessels, and implements that serve no purpose for their apathetic heirs. Job Lot (late 1700s–2024) presents 240 porcelain chamber pots in a tidy twelve-by-twenty conceptual art–like grid. Nothing refines random personal effects (including cherished collections) like recontextualizing them in a gallery setting where they immediately become auratic, precious, worthy of scrutiny, while simultaneously undoing these readings as givens. (Cue Duchamp.) Embellish them with roses, chintz patterns, deco designs, bucolic scenes, what have you, these pots—so neatly arranged, so pristine—are, quite literally, toilets. But of course, it’s not that simple. A framed newspaper spread from the Liverpool Echo, under the title “Lav will and testament,” tells how fifty-three-year-old Graham Randles from Allerton inherited the antique vessels from his father, who spent years scouring the country for choice specimens to hang (unused) from the ceiling of his pub. As much as Randles appreciated the array, he eventually listed it on Facebook Marketplace for £1,234 in the hopes of raising money to fix up the family home.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Job Lot, late 1700s–2024 (detail).
For now, the gallery is a temporary resting place, where the commodes sit alongside a technically more precious but equally forsaken family bequest. Unlike the sea of ceramic bedpans, however, Sir William Bellingham’s two trunks filled with George III silver remain locked shut. A series of emails tacked to the wall show the bureaucratic process of transferring the trunks to the gallery from the vaults of NatWest bank, as well as an exhaustive list of their unseen glittering contents: pear-shaped urns, circular meat plates, chambersticks, sugar bowls, tea caddies, coffeepots, frequently odd numbers of cutlery, and what have you.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Silver Service, 1774/2024.
Tools and instruments that remain untouched (unused silver tarnishes), bowls and platters that proffer no nourishment, sticks with no flickering candles; gaping ceramic mouths once hidden beneath beds, ornamented to ease distaste, now on display to nary be sullied again: the diptych is set to go to auction in 2025, where it will likely garner more than the sum of its parts, reevaluated and sanitized by whichever art-world demimonde, collector, or institution purchases it. Circulation and recirculation: Will it sit unseen in another vault, guarded by mazes of paperwork and red tape? On my visit the crates sat stolid and impenetrable, but Bellingham’s goods did not in fact arrive in time for the exhibition opening. Though the rectangles of black tape on the floor that now cordon the trunks off from visitors might not yet have been in place, I imagine they looked momentarily like gaping frames holding big question marks about how value is accrued, lost, transferred, relative.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Framing Device I and Framing Device II, both 2024.
Around the corner, another diptych presents more unknowns and yawning portraits: Framing Device I and Framing Device II (both 2024) are again objects borrowed, passed through unconventional channels, added and subtracted to show something as anew as askew. The first part consists of the transportation frames for the anonymously authored Wilton Diptych (ca. 1395–99), a rare altarpiece that survived the icon-culling of the Reformation. The carrying frame, a large wooden rectangle emblazoned with the work’s title in red marker, ALL CAPS, leans against a wall, its lower edge resting on a gray moving blanket; the handling frame, a slight wooden V, hangs from the ceiling on thin wires. Directly below it on a plinth is the second part of the diptych (the diptych diptych?), a gilded wood and velvet base that would normally have held the missing altarpiece. We can, by way of object labels copied from the National Gallery display, imagine what we cannot see—Saint Edward the confessor holding his martyring arrow, the Christ child with a crown of thorns, “a minute image of a green island with a white castle, set in a silver sea”—and in this exhibition, where absence makes the heart grow fonder, I prefer to.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Curtain, 2024.
Near the entrance, a pair of faded red velvet curtains salvaged from the clearing of Ghislaine Maxwell’s disgraced terrace house hang, forever closed, on a wall-mounted brass rail. Across the center, where the two drapes meet, the fabric is marked with a darker red rectangle, as though a painting or placard protected this swath from sun bleaching. Another missing image, a mystery, a cataract vision that obscures as much as it reveals about how objects can be upended and repurposed. Rather than blankness or nihilism (the gray land is, we must concede, very green, sometimes sunny, blooming roses, rolling hills, crashing waves), the strategies employed by Ourahmane and Al-Maria are, to me, hopeful: the future is irreverent, unconvinced by permanence, fulsomely void, as in, we cannot imagine it by looking to the past.
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land, installation view. Courtesy Spike Island. Pictured: Fly Tip, 2024 (detail).
The largest space in the exhibition holds detritus found in Bristol dumpsters—couches, chairs, toilet seats, mattresses, shopping carts—sealed and vacuum-packed in enormous bright aluminum bags. The effect of the air being sucked out has pulled the shining fabric into strange geometrics, so that one man’s trash has become wild, flying forms (one couch seems to have wings, the shopping cart looks possessed by velocity) somewhere between John Chamberlain sculptures and Andy Warhol’s room of floating metallic balloons. Practically, the seal renders the potentially toxic accumulated and illegally dumped debris safe and useful, seductive and even beautiful—a silver lining.
Emily LaBarge is a writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.