Basketball, the Cold War, Looney Tunes, and the films of Rainer Werner Fassbender: these are just some of the references that Gray Wielebinski playfully incorporates into his first institutional solo show. ‘The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low’ – a title lifted from the pages of an essay written by beloved sci-fi author Samuel R Delaney – is a curious amalgam of interactive art and objects which, through careful curation in London’s Institute of the Contemporary Arts (ICA), boldly speaks to the political and environmental precarity of our present.
Situated between Buckingham Palace and Whitehall, the show directly responds to the protection granted to institutional powers that may well bring about the end of the world as we know it. Wielebinski’s bunker, likewise, offers a space for visitors to engage in doomsday prepping by way of Silicon Valley billionaires and apocalypse fantasists. ‘In its privacy, surveillance, and exclusivity, the bunker also speaks the language of illicit spaces – another kind of world within a world,’ Wielebinski says, ‘where separating oneself leads towards community formation rather than isolation.’
