Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario

Being accosted by the odd crazy is an accepted part of city life from Manhattan to Mumbai. So it was not a big surprise when 15 minutes or so after leaving artist Ryan Gander’s new show, Locked Room Scenario, in a rather gnarly part of London, Phaidon was accosted by a very persistent lady insisting (via sign language) we’d dropped a torn out page from a novel on the pavement. So far so inner city. 

But when we learned that one friend had been picked up in a taxi he hadn’t ordered outside and another visitor texted by one of the exhibiting ‘artists’ the idea that the show really did have a life extending beyond the confines of the gallery – actually a disused warehouse – became altogether more intriguing.

If this invasion of private space is all rather creepy it’s nothing to the feeling engendered by the space itself. The idea is that the visitor turns up to see a collective show, Field Of Dreams. On arrival however, the venue appears to be closed. What work you can catch glimpse of is semi-hidden behind doors and oddly positioned windows (through one of which you can see an ‘artist’ peering at photographic slides presumably destined for a flickering projector down another corridor). After 20 minutes or so of walking down darkened hallways, pushing against unyielding doors and peering through windows positioned at ankle height the whole effect starts to get more than a little claustrophobic and, to tell the truth, a bit unsettling. The fact that none of the artists in the group show actually exist just adds to the questioning of what is real and what’s not - not only here but outside the gallery too (to the point where when someone asked us the way to the post office later that afternoon we momentarily found ourselves staring at them just a little too quizzically).

Gander who’s featured in Phaidon’s Vitamin 3-D, has been hosting the work of his fake artists for some time now. For this piece he worked hard creating Wikipedia histories and life stories for his ‘protégés’, waiting for Google to pick up on the entries and ‘verify’ their back-story.

"Finding the space was the difficult part,” he told Phaidon. “There were specific things that it needed: like a 20-second duration for the spectator to walk from the front door to what they perceive as reality (and safety) which would be the gate. But once you leave the gate there are things that happen in the outside world, 20-minutes, two days or a month later. So I wanted something that had a perimeter that you would consider the safe confines of a fiction and then, when you left it, you’d be surprised by things that happened. It keeps revisiting you in your life for a long time afterwards, you can never really brush it away."

Locked Room Scenario has some parallels to the work of Gregor Schneider’s constructed rooms series, featured in the forthcoming Defining Contemporary Art. However, Gander says the space itself is only a small part of the project. “I think people are preoccupied with the physicality of things though the only consistent thing with everyone’s visit is the space.”

Follow the link to Artangel to apply online. To fully engage with the project you’ll need to give them your mobile number.

For more images click here