This really is a ‘must see’. The Curve Gallery at the Barbican – which is pretty damn cavernous – has been brilliantly transformed by the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski into the most wonderfully evocative space. A cross between film sets from David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
It is an unsettling, eerie and atmospheric space evoking a different emotion in everyone who enters. What we are confronted with is a series of dimly lit spaces and rooms devoid of life. Part wartime bunker, part derelict factory. Decaying, dusty and desolate.
The sheer mastery of the illusion is breathtaking. Every bit of seemingly monumental concrete and rusting steel is actually made of wood and artificially distressed, exactly like a theatrical set. I have never seen a space so successfully transformed.
So get down there and experience it for yourself. It’s free and runs until 10th January 2010. Find out more here.