Navigating the dark

Navigating the dark
Nigel Ryan wanders through the Zeinab Khatoun House, the venue for London Nomad. And if nothing goes bump in the night, it isn't because the lights are working
"A floating collection of works by internationally renowned artists, the nvisible Museum materialises for tailor-made exhibitions in supremely unlikely venues."
So begins Ralph Rugoff's salute to this "unique institution", reproduced in the folding pamphlet issued by the British Council to accompany the London Nomad show, scheduled to run at Beit Zeinab Khatoun, behind Al-Azhar Mosque, until 11 April.
There is, perhaps, something telling about that nvisible -- "the I," we are told, "has evidently already vanished."
Cute, that. And is the Zeinab Khatoun House really so supremely unlikely a venue?
That out of the way, the show has undoubtedly generated a deal of excitement. And it is certainly nice to see the house being used.
London Nomad includes work by Hannah Collins, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Adam Lowe, Paul Morrison, Mark Pimlott, Marc Quinn, Georgina Starr and Sam Taylor-Wood. They are spread out over two floors of the house, and are unidentified. No teasing little cards to the side of the exhibits to provide distraction, the little hooks that so often catch the spectators attention to the detriment of everything else. Nothing but the work, in a room.
They mostly have a room to themselves. The visitor first encounters Hannah Collins' framed photograph, Heart and Soul, because it hangs directly in front of the door, desert landscapes with two centrifugal precipitators, if that is what they are called (glass bulbs that contain twirling fans), hanging from above the horizon. But from there on in, navigate as you will around the house. No route is indicated, nor should it be.
In a stone chamber off the courtyard a Goldstar television sits atop a grey table. This, I assumed, would be Taking a Cosmic Ray for a Walk, a 20 minute video loop. Oddly, a second, identical television sat on the floor. Would the cosmic ray be walking between the two? Difficult to find out, because there was no way of operating the televisions. And then a man appeared with a remote control. And yes, the television on the table was the cosmic loop, only we couldn't get it to run for more than a minute at a time. The second television, when it was started, was Georgina Starr's Crying, a separate video piece, listed in the brochure as "Video loop on monitor + white plinth". But there was no white plinth. A mystery.
A mystery solved, though, on climbing to the first floor, where the plinth was discovered. The television set, I suspect, should have been sitting atop the plinth (I concede I may be wrong). Something had gone wrong with the socket. Again I may be wrong. Whatever, the result was that it became possible to watch Crying, and Taking a Cosmic Ray for a Walk, simultaneously, in the room off the courtyard, if only at short intervals. In supremely unlikely venues fate will take a hand.
Difficult to see Damien Hirst's Opium, a print in a framed box, or Mark Pimlott's polished metal floor sculpture, which occupy the same large, elaborate, first floor space because there were no lights. It was 7pm, dark outside. Not a single shaft of sunlight to pierce the mashrabiya. (Opening from nine in the morning till nine at night -- a neatly semi-diurnal twelve hours -- is a singularly perfect timing. Unfortunately, electricity supplies at the Zeinab Khatoun House are less neatly semi-diurnal.) In the twilight, though, a square of polished metal could be made out set neatly in the centre of the polychromatic marble floor, reflecting the extravagant lamp that hangs for half the room's two storey height. The Damien Hirst was on a window ledge nearby and much more difficult to see.
Five Revolutionary Seconds XII, Sam Taylor-Wood's contact strip, is an elongated domestic-studio scene punctuated slightly off-centre by a man and woman lying on a sofa embracing. A set-piece, set-up, and framed beneath a glass table top. In a nearby room hangs Gary Hume's untitled, framed print. It is a Mr Blobby figure, green background, black eyes and blue body. And that, I'm afraid, is more or less it, at least during a non-daytime visit. If the vagaries of the local electricity supply, or in-house wiring -- go during the day if you do not want to feel short-changed -- are sympathetic, somewhere you will also find Paul Morrison's Eclipse, a black rubber painting, and Pool 1998, Mark Pimlott's glass floor sculpture. There are too, Bread Hands made in Cairo, Marc Quinn's contribution to the event. I have seen photographs of these three, but not the real things.
There is something reassuring that a quarter of the works presented from the collection of the nvisible Museum in the end turned out to be invisible, (and that is with the 'i').
"What makes this unique institution truly invisible," continues Ralph Rugoff in the brochure, "is not its collection, but the fact that it lacks all the tangible characteristics of the average museum. Possessing neither a physical nor a bureaucratic structure, it functions with the admirable economy of a virus, coming to life only where it finds an appropriate host."
The parasitic aspects of this virus metaphor would normally appear a little unfortunate. It is pleasant, then, that the Zeinab Khatoun House should have tempted its virus into something a little more symbiotic, into a relationship that may illuminate (or not) the virtues, and failings, of both.
A supremely unlikely venue?
Not at all.
A stunningly appropriate one?
What else.
For full details of the exhibition, see Listings
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