Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

The show was entitled "The Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster: TH.2058" and appeared in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in Londonhttps[13] from October 14, 2008 to April 13, 2009. At the opening of the show Dominique said, " Some months ago, I used to wake up in the silence of the night to think about what I was going to do. But not anymore. People ask me, 'Are you scared?' No, I am not scared. If I was, I wouldn't do it. Rather, I'm excited. I am putting one third of my energy into just staying calm. The work is on such a scale that if you got too excited, you would explode,".[1] The show was her first public commission in the UK and filled half of the 3,400 square meter hall. "TH.2058 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, imagines Tate Modern 50 years into the future, set in a London afflicted by perpetual rain. Tate Modern is being used as a shelter for people, a storage space for art works and for the remains of culture. The vast Turbine Hall is filled with monumental replicas of iconic sculptural works. Rows of bunk beds are scattered with books, and on a giant screen The Last Film is continuously running. Made up of short excerpts from science-fiction films, The Last Film suggests a potential state of catastrophe as well as the possibility of collective memory,".[1]

The installation at the Hispanic Society of America in New York was installed in 2009 and was entitled "chronotopes & dioramas". The Hispanic Society of America is a museum and research library with an impressive collection of paintings, decorative objects, books, documents, prints, and photographs. However, Dominique discovered it only had a limited supply of 20th century literature and wanted to fill in the gaps. She enlisted help from experts at the American Museum of Natural History. The project involved crafting three habitats in which volumes by nearly 40 authors replaced taxidermied fauna. One evokes water and verticality; another, aridity and flatness; the third, trailing vines. They represent three zones: North America, the Desert, and the Tropics. Aside from the books, each diorama contains a single, mute trace of human presence. In the underwater ocean scene there is an oil barrel. In the desert scene there are ruins of a concrete bunker. In the tropical scene there is a desolate, glass house. They each show the wear and tear of passing time. Many of the books in the dioramas are about anxiety and exile. She also created a mural-sized calligram (an arrangement of words that creates a related visual image). This is Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope; "functioning as the primary means for materializing time in space with the novel". The installation is housed in an annex to the library.