Haris Epaminonda, VOL.

IV Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery, 29 May 30 August 2010 The large window of Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery looks like an enigmatically empty vitrine these days. On closer inspection, a sparse number of elements reveals its subtle presence within this showcase: a table with a thin white frame; a diminutive vase; a small arched opening acting as a niche for another, near identical vase. It is one of the facets of Haris Epaminonda's new installation VOL. VI, the latest instalment in a series of meta-exhibitions titled as if they were tomes of an encyclopaedia, of an opus magna, or perhaps of a catalogue. These are in fact closely connected to Epaminonda's long-term collaboration with Daniel Gustav Cramer on The Infinite Library, an ongoing series of books created by extracting selected pages from ageing illustrated books and binding them together, to form completely new and seemingly haphazard correlations between found images already imbued with an abstract, often sculptural quality. VOL. VI expands this concept by making such plastic connections constantly shift between the second and the third dimension, as a number of framed book cut-outs is accompanied by african statuettes and ceramic objects on plinths or glassless vitrines and articulated in a labyrinthine sequence of rooms. A low wooden barrier and a cluttered room resembling a storage space complete the environment. This arrangement of items is unmistakeably meant to recreate a museum display, particularly of the kind that one would expect to find in a didactic exhibition of anthropological or historical finds. Only here all information on the origins of the exhibits and their reason for being placed right there is withdrawn. It is as if most of the exhibition had been deleted, whitened out or, perhaps more aptly, omitted; or as if the space is being experienced in an oneiric state, where text is supposed to be there, but isn't. Words and cyphers aren't completely absent, though. One of the wall-hung book pages shows the orphaned caption for a missing image; the description frustratingly insist on observing elements of the illustrated carpet - which isn't there. There is a carpet printed on the verso, barely visible through the page. There is also a real carpet, in a nearby room. But as in a dream, objects evoked from one's memory can look familiar and wrong at the same time. The shape of the arched niche visible from outside the gallery returns in one of the book pages as a domestic window; turning the corner, the same, real niche reappears as a void, with a view of the outside world through the same pane of glass that provided a first viewpoint into the installation. Page numbers are left on some of the book cut-outs, often accompanied by their yellowed blank margins. These aren't just mere illustrations: they are found objects, subject to entropic processes of material degradation, printed with ink on paper, with visible halftone dots resulting in those unreal colours capable of triggering a pre-conscious sense of nostalgia. Moreover, while these pages are presumably taken from illustrated catalogues or otherwise factual, informative, scientific books, their role here is rather to evoke through a systematic act of data subtraction. In turn, this lack of information generates a potentially infinite number of possible associations: migrations of forms, subjective projections, cultural assumptions and so forth. This visual riddle is even replicated through the free booklet distributed to the visitors like an exhibition guide. But no guidance can be found in it only more associations. The cover doesn't even carry the artist's name. Just the back of a geisha's head, like a faceless, mute sphinx whose silhouette vaguely returns in the waterfall illustrated on the back cover. Inside, between the laconic VI on the frontispiece and the colophon, are two texts by the curators: a series of evocative -but entirely unrelated - autobiographical Fragments by Kathy Noble, and a brief essay by Kyla

McDonald on the experience of exhibition galleries as culturally and historically connoted spaces. Of all the things one can expect from Tate Modern, lack of interpretation material is a genuine surprise. VOL. VI is a bold gesture, an exhibition that is as lyrical as it is obscure and in this sense, a bizarrely successful, if ironic, attempt to make institutional critique that is aimed at the general public as much as at the institution itself, and more in general at the institution of museography. It is refreshing to see an exhibition at Tate that does not underestimate its viewers a priori, and in this sense it is a shame that the Level 2 gallery should live in the shadow of its cumbersome container.