Tiffany Chung, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, and Shirin Neshat. Works from Faurschou Collection

Continuing the thread Faurschou introduced in 2019 at its inaugural New York show, The Red Bean Grows in the South, the exhibition, Works from Faurschou Collection, presents a selection of four significant works that speak about the precarious state of the world.

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.

“We are thrilled to be back in Brooklyn after such a long hiatus,” says Jens Faurschou, founder of the foundation. “We had planned to open these shows in the spring of 2020. The intervening two years have only deepened the significance of the works, which illuminate the eauty, challenges, and contradictions that people face each day.” Works from Faurschou Collection will be on view at Faurschou New York, February 27 - July 31, 2022.