ART CITIES: Basel-Daniel Turner
Daniel Turner is engaged in a critical examination of the lives of objects, often melting down, liquifying, burning, or otherwise transmuting the materiality of everyday objects into other forms. The US-American artist probes how the materialities of objects retain embedded traces and histories of the contexts for which they were made and in which they were used.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthalle Basel Archive
Daniel Turner studied painting and printmaking at Norfolk State University and received a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute. Turner worked in construction and demolition before being employed as a security guard at The New Museum in New York City. He was hospitalized several times for psychosis resulting in an action titled “Burning an Entire Body of Work” (2006) in which he burned all previous paintings to date. Turner now works primarily in sculpture often involving the creation or transformation of materials, objects and environments into architectural or ephemeral forms. His sculptures are often characterized by a specific response to site under a controlled set of processes. As the artist says “I work specific to the site because the site itself is very important to me. I’m speaking in terms of exhibition context (site) as well as the extraction of material from a given provenance (site). Site activates work and of course work activates site. There is a harmonious marriage between the two and when in tune, a particular lift occurs”. This approach has enabled Turner to base form on transposition, preserving a sensory link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact. These elements are present in works where an entire waiting room is cast into a series of solid bars, a former psychiatric facility burnished to a darkened stain against a wall, or a cafeteria dissolved across the expanse of a floor. In 2019, Turner extracted one metric ton of hospital beds from The Vinnitsa Regional Psychoneurological Hospital in Vinnitsa Ukraine which were archived, melted and recast into two solid forms. For “Three Sites” his first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland, he is creating a new body of site responsive sculptures. Each is made from elements extracted from sites in the Basel region that triangulate between architecture and psychology, including a former psychiatric care facility as well as chemical and pharmaceutical industry buildings. Present and past overlap ceaselessly. These two temporalities are never still, as the artist strives to entangle them even further through various degrees of object metamorphosis, sometimes intervening himself directly in situ. These artefacts are made all the more elusive by the fact that they belong to a standardised, industrial and ready-made universe, devoid of warmth, almost clinical; at first glance, they seem affectless, enabling nothing to transpire of their autobiographical resonance. It is the case with the burnishes on wooden panels produced with stainless steel wool applied by hand. As evanescent as they are informal, the subtle chromatic traces composing blurred masses with erratic outlines betray nothing of the repurposed material’s true genealogy. And yet, this steel wool was produced out of metallic chairs gleaned from an American psychiatric institution. A way of reinjecting meaning, all the while retaining a sense of reserve, in materials that wouldn’t be suspected of harbouring such energy.
Photo: Daniel Turner, VRPH Bar 1, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and The Pinchuk Art Center
Info: Kunsthalle Basel, Steinenberg 7, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 16/9/2022-8/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:30, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.kunsthallebasel.ch/en/
