Murray Guy is very pleased to announce a new exhibition with Ann Lislegaard, featuring two installations comprised of sound, light, mirrors, digital animation and architectural interventions.

Enacting various scenarios of unreadibility or foreignness, Lislegaard’s new work takes up “science fiction” as a form that—by imagining seemingly impossible future worlds and speculative modes of dissemination—can be used to reflect critically on current structures of communication, affect, and narrative.

In one room of the gallery, an animated vulpine creature, projected onto mirrored box that has been unfolded across the floor, delivers a stuttering account of a visit to a distant future. Drawn in part from H.G. Wells’ novel The Time Machine, the fox’s dyspeptic narrative and fragmented voice seem on the edge of collapse: words are repeated, languages interchange, and sentences dissolve.

The other room of the gallery has been altered by the addition of a freestanding wall, a leaning platform, and a concealed neon sign that reads “science fiction”. Cloaked in darkness, the fragmented space is dominated by four loudspeakers, which act as seats while emitting diverse hums, whines, creaks, growls, and whispers—sonic fields derived by compressing and stretching soundtracks from science fiction films: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), and Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997).

Rather than a deconstruction or dissolution of categories of language or meaning, Lislegaard’s environments involve a multiplication: of speakers and receivers, insides and outsides, pasts and futures. As the worlds imagined by novels like The Time Machine seem less fantastical amid present-day ecological and technological change, she suggests, they can function as tools for modeling or testing out new structures and relationships.