Introduction

British artist Ryan Gander was invited to create a new work for the Forum’s 10th birthday celebrations. The intriguing installation revisits the history of Western art, the memory of the Forum itself and the roll-call of its exhibitions since opening in 1991. Born in 1976, Ryan Gander lives and works in London. He is one of the rising stars of the international contemporary art scene, with exhibitions at the Yokohama Triennale, and the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Icarus Falling, his ‘lost’ exhibition presented at the Forum, celebrates the encounter between a bold contemporary artist and a decade of history. Gander has created a work evoking the past thirty exhibitions at the Forum, associated with pieces echoing the history of art, and the works of an imaginary stable of artists – calling into a parallel reality that blurs and confuses our perception of the past and present.

Ryan Gander’s art excels at finding new, ironic uses for objects and at exploring the ambiguous interplay of reality and fiction. His works are exceptionally effective visually, but they also draw on language as a means to captivate the visitor. At the Forum, his installations and texts challenge the essential status of the work of art and the exhibition concept. The artist sets out to demonstrate ‘how we remember exhibitions, how we forget them, how we imagine them, document them, and produce them, with recourse to the history of art.’ Taking this as his starting point, he invites the visitor to construct his or her own artistic mythology in what is, inevitably, an alternative reality.