Remains to Be Seen

Ten artists each contributed an artwork consisting of nothing more than a few sentences. All of their words will be read aloud from a small airplane as it circles above the Kunsthalle Tropical, an exhibition site that none of the artists have visited. Instead, the artists drew inspiration from the idea that some places are best visited only in one’s imagination.

The work will never actually be seen—its form is oral, its locale inhospitable.

Thoughts

Thoughts

Originally, the artists conceived of installations, performances, and interventions to be staged at the Kunsthalle Tropical in the Icelandic desert. It was their intent that the works be executed without an audience.

When the curator and artists realized that they themselves would in fact constitute an audience, the group decided to abandoned plans of journeying to the barren place.

Instead, they stayed in the fishing village of Husavik, where they reworked their plans and settled on a new, oral—and aerial—exhibition format.

Information

Information

Due to the sudden eruption of Bárdarbunga, a nearby volcano, the last attempt to fly over the Kunsthalle failed, as the 2015 attempt did due to inclement weather. In 2019 the same concept was successfully executed by Marcel Meury in the Kunsthalle Tropical in the Engadin, Switzerland (see Instagram).

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Just like authors have unpublished novels in their drawers, every curator has exhibition ideas stashed away in secret folders on their MacBook Pro or scribbled in half-empty notebooks, from quiet performances to wild nights out and everything in between. In an effort to give old ideas new life, Random Institute regularly releases some of these failed or unrealized projects online. Some weren’t ripe yet, some were flat out rejected, and some just didn’t make any sense at all. But each of them brought us new ideas, and we hope they’ll find their home or catch some digital flâneur’s eye here on the world wide web.