Alex Margo Arden’s Theatre of the Absurd

Alex Margo Arden’s solo show ‘All Clear’ waggishly delights in a disorientating restaging of history. On the windows of Ginny on Frederick, a former shop unit, the artist has hung a series of large signs that announce, in red and black font, a ‘not closing down sale’. The works, which initially appear mechanically printed, are, in fact, painstakingly hand-rendered in soft pastel: Arden has duped us. The signs draw on the sarcastic marketing strategy employed at a store in Farringdon ten years ago, when preliminary construction work on London’s new Elizabeth line threatened local businesses. By the time the railway eventually opened in May, the original store had long since closed. 

Inside, past the delicate paper advertisements, the artist has precariously positioned a clustered hoard of old wooden objects at the back of the small gallery. None are easily identifiable: chairs, drawers, easels, pallets, perhaps, of indeterminate age and origin. Uncanny, plastic models of wartime food are wrapped in clingfilm and presented on discontinued National Health Service plates. Three small objects, quaintly displayed as if in a local museum, take centre-stage: half a wax green apple, a single silver hairpin and a prayer book titled What Is This? Together, they hint at the owner’s identity. 

Each item in the pile appears numbered in the way an archaeologist might label discoveries before removing them from site. Though these numbers promise clarity, only one thing is clear: we’re looking at remains. But don’t be fooled: the seemingly meticulous numbering system goes awry. The labels are too miscellaneous to be ordered, while the consecutive numbering appears too intentional to be entirely random. It’s all staged.

Above the mound of wood are a number of theatrical spotlights. Pointing only at each other, they subvert their use, absurdly illuminating themselves rather than the objects below – a distortion of theatrical convention that calls into question the functioning of a stage. Arden mounts the lights on a strip of brick-textured theatre backdrop, lining the top of the gallery’s tiled walls, creating confusion between the original fixtures and artificial additions. Hidden within the pile of wooden artefacts resides a tiny shoebox theatre, in which two model old ladies stand before miniature ‘not-closing-down-sale’ signs. 

The installation, it becomes clear, is the stage set replicated in the miniature theatre, prompting a dizzying, dollhouse effect. The viewer’s participatory role becomes confused: we are both the player, acting on the stage the model replicates, and the audience watching the performance. The model’s multiple layers of time complicate the viewer’s temporal identity. It presents a performance planned for the future in front of a backdrop of ten-year-old sale signs whilst being set within a museological display that references a generic past. Our simple identity as the contemporary viewer begins to crumble: we’re both the audience and the performer, not just contemporary but also of the past and future.

No installation element is what it seems: prints are drawings, artefacts are worthless, numbers go nowhere, lights illuminate nothing, stage and audience swap places, past, present and future blur. In confusing the identities of space, time and participation, Arden scrutinizes our role in the performative re-enactment of history. Simultaneously complicit as audience and performers, we are, at once, within and outside its narratives. Through her method of disorientation, she invokes a self-consciousness in the viewer that reminds us how the process of witnessing and performing history is inseparably syphoned through our contemporary bodies and identities.

Alex Margo Arden’s ‘All Clear’ is at Ginny on Frederick by appointment until 10 July 

^{Main image: Alex Margo Arden, ‘All Clear’, 2022, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Ginny on Frederick, London}