Chung + Gupta + Hatoum + Neshat Works from Faurschou Collection

Mona Hatoum’s Turbulence, an installation of glass marbles held in position by nothing more than a thin fishing line, sets the tone for the exhibition as a meditation on global fragility. Evidently delicate and tenuous, the fishing line seems as if it could break at any moment, spilling marbles everywhere. Like Turbulence, all works in the exhibition touch upon uncertainty and the global threats that impact us, including climate change, the pandemic, war, and other humanitarian crises.

Entering the exhibition, the visitor is confronted by the strong scent of soap. Shilpa Gupta's interactive work Threat, which consists of thousands of bars of soap imprinted with the word “threat,” invites visitors to reduce the threat level by physically taking a bar home with them. The large stacks of brown bars—the soap is colored to match the artist’s skin tone—appear brick-like and sturdy, playing on our sense of what may or may not represent permanent danger. Juxtaposed with Hatoum’s Turbulence, Gupta’s installation compounds the visitor’s sense of unease, uncertainty, and flux.

In a second room, Tiffany Chung’s detailed piece, From the Mountains to the Valleys, From the Deserts to the Seas: Journeys of Historical Uncertainty, fills the space with more than a thousand small handmade glass animals that are migrating to an unknown land while Shirin Neshat’s epic photographic work, Speechless, stares back at the audience with unrelenting gaze.