QWERTY Afterlife service version 2.0, at Art Fair Suomi 2017, 25.-28. May,
Cable Factory
Tallberginkatu 1 C,
00180 Helsinki,
FINLAND
Josh Spero’s Frieze Week diary (Spears) review of “QWERTY After life service” at Sluice_2015, OXO Tower, London:
Upstairs the Danish collective QWERTY took you on a journey to your afterlife. You walked into various rooms they had demarcated on the cold concrete floor and decided on different aspects of your dispatch: burial or cremation? an unusually shaped urn? how about a coffin fitted to your sleeping posture (in my case, splayed)? I even had one lady sing a Danish funeral melody to me. (I joined in – it seemed like good form.)
This might sound not much like art, but I’d disagree: think of all the vases of fading flowers in Dutch painting, the tomb in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, all the funerary monuments of the world. Death is one of art’s proper subjects, and anything creative that makes us think about death – even something as simultaneously unsettling and amusing as QWERTY – is fit.
Art Fair Suomi 2017: http://artfairsuomi.fi/afs_2017/en/