Solar Catastrophe, 2012
Shape Shifter, 2013
Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla (born 1974, USA and 1971, Cuba) identify and stress hairline fractures in societal systems through performance, sculpture, sound, video and photography. Solar Catastrophe continues the artists’ engagement with the political and socio-economic forces at play in their native Puerto Rico, which their exhibition at Lisson Gallery London, ‘Foreign in a Domestic Sense’, expands upon (until 11 November 2017). Made from discarded polycrystalline solar panel cells, which are thrown out every two years, the artists highlight the practice of ‘greenwashing’ a product’s environmental credentials. Constructed in the manner of an abstract painting, the surface of the work absorbs and reflects light, changing colour depending on atmospheric conditions. Shapeshifter is also an abstraction, this time of the marks left on or by used sandpaper sheets, collected from building sites around the world, representing both destruction and construction, human labour and mechanical erasure.