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\n Emily LaBarge<\/p>\n
\t Anna Boghiguian \t
\n Emily LaBarge<\/p>\n
Epic and anarchic: a trio of installations showcase the artist\u2019s rangy, timeless world-making.<\/p>\n
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Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Sunken Boat, 2025 (detail).<\/p>\n
Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, curated by Sarah Martin, Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate, United Kingdom, through October 26, 2025<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
\u201cTo stand at the edge of the sea,\u201d writes Rachel Carson in Under the Sea-Wind, \u201cis to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly life can be.\u201d The shoreline is a transformative space, transitional and cosmic, strange and seductive; a kind of time travel, poetry in motion\u2014a real metaphor about cycling and recycling, about how every particle of matter is used over and over again, how everything is connected, how this is a true and beautiful thing too easy to forget. \u201cWhen we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself,\u201d she observed over a decade later in The Edge of the Sea, \u201cthe primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Sunken Boat, 2025 (detail).<\/p>\n
The Cairo-born Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian brings us to this shore\u2014or a version of it\u2014at Turner Contemporary in Margate, situated at the edge of the Kent coast that looks out to the North Sea (in the very location the painter J. M. W. Turner lived for twenty years, painting the waves and the sky into abstractions). Two seascapes bookend the exhibition, which unfolds across three rooms, each containing a single, large-scale installation. I almost wrote \u201cimmersive,\u201d but the contemporary lingo of art writing is too slick and practiced, too institutionalized-shorthand, for Boghiguian\u2019s work, which is rangy, heterogeneous, anarchic, preciously unprecious, precisely imprecise, and weirdly timeless\u2014like an epic novel, a ballad, a Wagnerian opera cycle. Boghiguian\u2019s language is all her own and refreshingly dismissive of the tidiness\u2014or even the controlled, orchestrated mess\u2014so often found in contemporary installation. Hers is magical and a little grubby, world-making with broad strokes, light-touch-sui-generis\u2014a bit like the singular, shambolic genius of the duo Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, or the highly textured on-the-verge-of-breakdown Ed Kienholz.<\/p>\n
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Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Salt Traders, 2015.<\/p>\n
We enter the show through The Salt Traders\u00a0(2015), and I say \u201cthrough\u201d because, once you walk into the first gallery, it\u2019s all around you, not just its materials (vast rolling-sail canvases hanging rakishly from the ceiling as if displaced by errant gusts of wind, a weathered timber boat broken into three pieces scattered around the room like a ruin, eight large wooden frames holding drawings and honeycomb and salt and sand), but its smells (the dry sourness of a pinch of salt; the diffuse, chalky dust of sand and gravel), sounds (crunching underfoot, sliding on grit), textures (rough, desiccated, grainy, weathered). Ropes and red skeins of yarn, brown sackcloth sandbags and craggy boulders of varying sizes are strewn around fields of pale reddish-brown gravel and sand, as if washed up on some dystopian shore, but the more visitors, the more the gravel is spread and tracked around the room, footprints and smears of strides muddying the environment. The broken boat lies in pieces, its ribs bared like the remains of a body, its crude steering wheel lying impotent, forever detached from its rudder.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first the world was covered in water; the first contact of humans and many animals is with saltwater; an embryo lives in saltwater to protect itself,\u201d Boghiguian says, in her gnomically cosmic fashion, of the artwork that was originally created for the Istanbul Biennial. (Interviews with the artist are oddly soothing, filled with abstract statements that make distant connections entirely convincing when delivered in her frank manner: everything is connected, she offers, in various ways, again and again, harder to refute at each iteration.) Is this scene, this environment, this tableau past, present, future? All at once? None of the above?<\/p>\n
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Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Salt Traders, 2015 (detail).<\/p>\n
The wall text tells us The Salt Traders is \u201cset in the year 2300 CE,\u201d when climate change has caused ice caps to melt and obscured relics to reemerge, newly uncovered by a ruined world (this explains the lack of figures, in spite of Boghiguian\u2019s commitment to figuration). There is an air of chaos to the scene, but its rugged materials dissemble: the ragged-seeming sails are, on reflection, carefully hung so that they fold heavy and sumptuous like Renaissance drapery. One is ocher and mustard and crimson and poppy-red, but pale and sun-bleached as if naked to the elements for years; the other is painted with a map of the Mediterranean migration routes, the molecular structure of salt, and the shape of honeycomb. The latter two happen to be the same, hexagonal, and repeated in Boghiguian\u2019s nearby drawings in freestanding vitrine-like frames, which also hold actual honeycomb, sticky and dense, like time and history.<\/p>\n
And what, exactly, is \u201ca glimpse into past histories,\u201d as per the title of the show? And where, exactly, are we? History is not always past, and is never completely visible, might be one wager; but we have a persistent duty to look\u2014valiantly large-scale: to see how the world around has come to be, to know that we might both image and imagine it differently.<\/p>\n
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\u200b\u200bAnna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Square, The Line and The Ruler. Ambiguous Philosophers \/ Ambiguous Politicians, 2019.<\/p>\n
Where The Salt Traders takes aim at the global violence and resource exploitation that have ravaged the earth and contributed to climate collapse, The Square, The Line and The Ruler. Ambiguous Philosophers \/ Ambiguous Politicians (2019) locates power structures in, literally, thirty-two larger-than-life individuals who have notably marked, for Boghiguian, \u201cthe decisions of the world.\u201d Painted in wax encaustic on Khadi paper, the figures become solid and hang heavy and stiff, dangle and turn as people walk past where they are suspended from the ceiling above a giant chessboard. Putin hangs alongside Rabindranath Tagore hangs alongside Golda Meir hangs alongside Churchill hangs alongside Gandhi hangs alongside Queen Victoria, Pythagoras, Einstein, Mandela, Bonaparte. We at once know (loosely) how the world is today, and we see (or intuit) how it might have been otherwise. Everything is connected, but there are also more possible variations of chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.<\/p>\n
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Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories, installation view. Courtesy Turner Contemporary. Photo: Thierry Bal. Pictured: The Sunken Boat, 2025 (detail).<\/p>\n
The exhibition ends with its eponymous work, created specifically for the context of Margate, defined by its long, curving seafront and its tide that seems to come so far in and head so far out: at certain times of day, you have to walk for what feels like miles to get wet past your knees. The large room is bathed in blue light and filled with sand, over which are scattered cutouts of marine life, swimmers, shipwrecks. The walls are alternately bare, cast with the shadows of hanging bodies, this time in swim shorts and snorkel gear, or painted, fantastically colored city- and landscapes. Where are we, I ask again? On land? At sea? An accompanying audio piece combines sound from Margate and Alexandria, Egypt, as if we could be in both at the same time, as if Boghiguian is our conduit between the two. At the edge of the sea, we become aware that another world is not only possible, it\u2019s already here\u2014we just can\u2019t always see it.<\/p>\n