This is the first solo UK exhibition of the Russian couple who have been making photographs, films and performances for 30 years, first as dissident Soviet artists and then, since 1988, as New York-based members of the international art world. As well as photographs from their underground period and a slide projection piece, the Lisson show (19 September-26 October) also presents “Incidents”, the Kopystiansky’s richly symbolic, two-screen video projection in which discarded objects are filmed blowing along the streets of Manhattan. Captured in random motion on the artist’s camera, each piece of abandoned flotsam—whether an umbrella, a piece of newspaper or a polystyrene cup—takes on an individual and idiosyncratic life of its own, which becomes all the more marked when their paths cross with other pieces of anthropomorphic debris in what appears almost like an animated social encounter. In the new gallery Spanish artist Santiago Sierra (above, “Object measuring 600x57x52 cm, constructed to be held horizontally to a wall”, 2001) has his first solo UK show with a specially conceived piece that revolves around the notion of inauguration (10 September-31 October).
Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as 'Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky. Santiago Serra'