Chilling at Frieze

Amongst the sensory art overload of Frieze, Tue Greenfort's Frieze Project seems like a brilliant oasis. Chancing on the door, tucked away between stands, you enter what at first feels like total, numbing darkness, a black refuge from the ominpresent white of the Frieze tent. Soundproofed from the jabber of gallerists, all you can hear is the sound of sloshing waves and the gentle thrum of what sounds like an air conditioning unit. As your eyes adjust you notice a window; and in the window are plastic water bottles, slowly filling as water drips down a tube into them.

Amongst the sensory art overload of Frieze, Tue Greenfort's Frieze Project seems like a brilliant oasis. Chancing on the door, tucked away between stands, you enter what at first feels like total, numbing darkness, a black refuge from the ominpresent white of the Frieze tent. Soundproofed from the jabber of gallerists, all you can hear is the sound of sloshing waves and the gentle thrum of what sounds like an air conditioning unit. As your eyes adjust you notice a window; and in the window are plastic water bottles, slowly filling as water drips down a tube into them.

Because this isn't an oasis; it's an anti-oasis. The dehumidifier is sucking the water from the air, the water leeched from your breath and skin. Greenfort has reversed the polarity; instead of consuming water from plastic bottles, humans are filling them.

Greenfort has long been fascinated by our relationship with water. Body Water Condensation is a close relation of an earlier Greenfort work BONAQUA Condensation Cube, which itself was a nod to Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube (1963-65), in which Haacke sealed water inside a clear cube, allowing the artwork's environment to dictate the state and appearnce of the contents. Greenfort added a deliberately political twist to his version by adding Bonaqua - the notorious Coca Cola-branded tap water which, in India, led to water depletion of wells in villages around the bottling plant.

Last year at the Münster Skulptur Projeckte, his installation Diffuse Entries consisted of a silver agricultural manure sprayer spurting treated water into Lake Aa, a lake badly polluted by agricultural run-off. Greenfort's water contained ferric chloride, the chemical pumped into the lake to counter the resulting algae bloom. Typically for Greenfort's work, it was about transparancy - revealing how humans and the natural world really interact. And talking of transparancy, did anyone spot Greenfort's commission for  RSA's Art & Ecology, lurking by the exit ramp? More about that soon.

Anyway nice that Adrian Searle singled out Greenfort's Frieze commission for special comment:

Dehumidifiers hum, and all our sweat and exhaled moisture is being collected. It drips through plastic tubing into recycled water bottles, visible in a glass-walled aperture. The water may be pure, but I wouldn't drink it. Greenfort wants us to think about our relationship with water, and the ecological wastefulness of drinking the fancy imported stuff.This room is more than a lesson. I stand in this wonderfully cloistered gloom and feel myself slowly dessicating, as I watch my entire being dribbling into an old Evian bottle. Stand here long enough and I'd be dust. Just add water.