Take Ten

(2019)

Toad on the Moon takes the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor as a point of departure: the false but persistent belief that a frog will remain in slowly heated water until it boils. The exhibition uses this fiction to consider how gradual deterioration can become normalised, and how adaptation can shift from a means of survival into a form of inertia.

The title draws on myths that locate the figure of a toad on the moon, where it appears in stories of transformation, immortality and escape. Between the warming water and the moon, the exhibition traces a tension between endurance and withdrawal, asking when adaptation becomes acceptance, and when escape might offer another way of responding to an increasingly uninhabitable present.

Location

Las Palmas Project, Lisbon

Dates

2019

Materials / media

Mixed textiles, acrylic resin, plaster, submersible water pump, calamine, Himalayan salt, bismuth subsalicylate, cochineal pigment and found objects.


Photo Credits

João Neves