Dig

Daniel Silver

Grafton Way, London
11 September 2013 - 03 November 2013

Visitors came across Dig in a half-constructed, abandoned, overgrown site in central London where one of London's largest Odeon Cinemas had once stood, just off Tottenham Court Road. A large number of figurative forms were lying around — eroded, fragmented, remodelled. What were they doing there? When had they been uncovered? What belief system did they belong to?

A group of larger than life statues of bearded figures watched over a flooded underworld, accessed by walking along wooden planks laid over the muddy ground. Hundreds of other sculptures and fragments, seemingly more recent, were laid out on wooden tables or grouped in families of artefacts. Like unearthed objects from an unfamiliar culture, Silver’s sculptures did not give up their secrets easily.

Presented in the guise of a quasi-archaeological project, Daniel Silver’s Dig was an excavation of the role of figures of worship, idols and fetishes in different cultures, ancient and modern. It alluded to the evolution of sculptural forms across time and place, losing old powers and meanings and acquiring new ones as the forms fragment and multiply.

Following the closure of Dig in London, part of the project traveled to the Gennadius Library in Athens, Greece as part of the group exhibition A Thousand Doors, curated by Iwona Blazwick, from 4 May – 30 June 2014.


Image: Artefacts from Daniel Silver's Dig (2013). Image treatment: Modern Activity. Photograph: Marcus Leith.

Making Dig

Daniel Silver in conversation with James Lingwood
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Making Dig: Daniel Silver in conversation with James Lingwood

Shortly following its opening, Daniel Silver discussed his project Dig with Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood at the artist's studio. Here is an edited transcript of that conversation.

James Lingwood: Daniel, I want to start by asking you about your first memory of looking at sculpture.

Daniel Silver: My parents grew up in South Africa and Zimbabwe. We had some African sculptures, and there was one, which my parents still have, which is a mother and child. It’s wood, very totemic. I remember throughout my childhood just playing with this, pushing it over, standing up with it, moving it around. It’s probably from the seventies and it’s a kind of modernist version of an African sculpture. Whenever I go back home I always see it. If there is anything I want from my parents, it’s this sculpture.

Did you know as a kid growing up in Jerusalem that this was an African sculpture? Did it feel different, alien to the environment you were growing up in, not the domestic environment but the cultural environment?

The domestic environment was brown wood so it sort of fitted into the aesthetics of the house, but it was very different from anything I saw outside.

Were you in the Old City?

I went to an experimental school in the market in Jerusalem. Throughout my childhood, one of my mother’s friends used to take us to archaeological digs, which was a very strange thing to do on the weekend.

Read the rest of this conversation.


Image: Daniel Silver, Dig (2013). Photograph: Marcus J Leith

Audio: The Artangel Podcast 7, Diggings

22 minutes 55 seconds
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In episode 7 of the Artangel Podcast, an archaeologist, an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst visit Dig.

The three experts encounter the split-level work for the first time and explore its many layers of possible meaning: from Freudian visions of Rome and the subconscious to the iconography of unknowable utopias.

Featuring:

  • Ludovic Coupaye, lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at UCL and curator of the Ethnographic Collection
  • Ian Jenkins, Senior Curator at the British Museum with responsibility for ancient Greek collections
  • Jay Watts, psychotherapist, Lacanian analyst and Senior Lecturer at City University
  • Daniel Silver, the artist behind Dig

Producer: Peter Meanwell


Image: Detail from Daniel Silver's Dig (2013). Photograph: Marcus J Leith

Texts: four writers on Dig

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… there are also vestigial traces of the grand picture palace: in the car park’s sloping floor, where the auditorium once stood; in the remains of the proscenium arch and the plasterwork of the orchestra; and the bright green terrazzo floor of the former entrance hall. – Christopher Turner

Texts: Four writers on Dig 

In a series of texts variously written before, during and after a visit to the installation, four writers respond to the literary, psychological and occasionally whimsical notions of art and artefacts unearthed by Dig.

Christopher Turner, Sex and the Eternal City

Sharon Kivland, A London Fantasy

Deborah Friedell, In Bloomsbury

Dr Marine Rouleau, Waiting for the Aura

Audio: Excavations, Iwona Blazwick, Ian Jenkins and Adam Phillips discuss Dig

1 hour 10 minutes 37 seconds
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Excavations

In this talk Iwona Blazwick, Ian Jenkins and Adam Phillips discuss Silver's sculptures as objects from an unfamiliar culture.

Recorded at The Slade Research Centre, 29 October 2013.

Also available to hear on Soundcloud.

Book

Edited by James Lingwood with an essay by Tom Morton
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Publication: Dig

£15 from Cornerhouse

Edited by James Lingwood, with an essay by Tom Morton

  • Designed by Modern Activity
  • Photographs by Alice May Williams and Marcus Leith
  • Printed by Lecturis, Eindhoven
  • Hardback, 96pp, 200mm x 150mm.
  • Printed in an edition of 500 copies
  • ISBN 978-1-902201-29-0

 

 

None

Credits

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Who made this possible?

Credits

Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of The Henry Moore Foundation. With thanks to University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Artangel is generously supported by Arts Council England and the private patronage of the Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.