David Mabb & Henrik Schrat

David Mabb and Henrik Schrat have explored their joint interest in and critique of utopian and dystopian thought through dialogues between the works in the exhibition. The artists have used two books as a departure point: William Morris’ Wood beyond the World, 1892, and Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1977. William Morris was a 19th Century English designer, writer and communist whose wallpaper and fabric designs are still widely distributed today. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were Russian science fiction writers who collaborated on novels which were widely read during the Soviet period in Russia and eastern Europe. Andrei Tarkovsky made Roadside Picnic into the film Stalker in 1979. Rather than constructing a new utopia, this exhibition explores the historical utopian and dystopian imaginary, with an emphasis on various types of Communism (utopian Communism, vanguardist Communism, the Communist avant-garde and "Communism" from 1945-89 in Eastern Europe).
In the front room of the gallery, pages from two William Morris Kelmscott Press facsimiles of Morris’ late romance fantasy narrative Wood beyond the World are glued to the wall in a frieze (Mabb) that intersects with Schrat’s sculptural Memorial to Boris Strugatsky, who died in November 2012. Also intersecting with the frieze is a mural (Schrat) that makes use of some
imagery from the Morris Kelmscott book to illustrates scenes from the “zone” in Roadside Picnic where extraterrestrials have landed and have changed everything. Both are lit by the glowing neon Red Rocket (Mabb) that reworks Dan Flavin’s monuments to V. Tatlin.
In the back room of the gallery, the song Der Rote Wedding, a Communist fighting anthem from the 1920s, is performed by the Commandantes, 2006, to form the soundtrack to Mabb’s video A closer look at the life and work of William Morris (Red Wedding version) which takes Morris’ flower patterns down to the square form of the pixel and back again. Its projection is interruped by hanging, drooping cut outs of a William Morris pattern (Schrat).