The site of 'Wrecking at Private Siding 661' at Wapping is the point at which colonial history and Bridget Baker’s personal narrative intertwine. Now based in London, Baker was born in East London from a line of British settlers. These early narratives are transposed to the site at Wapping, East London, in the UK, where a large and peculiar object – a human transporter (a 19th century woven vessel) – has been recreated. The human transporter is installed in a distinct red brick hydraulic power station, which, due to its proximity to the Thames, powered a great part of London at the turn of the 19th century. Its heyday coincides with that of English settlement in South Africa, and the arrival of Baker’s ancestors in the Eastern Cape.

As you approach the space, your entry is shaped by a shattered bricked wall entrance, a construction which nods to the shattered wall framing the supine nude in Duchamp’s posthumously-built work Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66). However in Baker’s work the viewer is invited to enter into the space, in contrast to the cool, distanced, voyeuristic gaze encouraged by Duchamp’s peephole. Although the human transporter sits quite comfortably in time within the accumulator tower, clues to its recent reconstruction are revealed in one anachronism: Looking up, one sees a shattered white Perspex ceiling, as if the transporter has crashed through. Descending from the top of the accumulator tower and through the ruptured ceiling, the woven object materialises a passage through time and space.

29 September - 11 February.