Grace Wales Bonner’s A Time for New Dreams

The Grace Wales Bonner curated show at the Serpentine’s Sackler Gallery — one of many art spaces sponsored by the Sackler family, controversially so, with proceeds allegedly culled from the US opioid crisis, and their pharmaceutical downer prime Oxycontin — creates, or rather re-creates a series of devotional spaces, personal shrines and thoughts of prayer. Each piece is a moment, a caress, an abstract, as if taken from the corners of rooms and brought together to frame this space, a space of contemplative feeling, hope and outreach. Spirituality and art draw near in this arrangement; this bringing together, almost touching, an overlaying, or a return even.

It is a space riven with its own journeys, ones that we fleetingly cross and traverse — poets speak words softly echoing rhymes from the walls, choirs open with song hailing holy from a congregation of speakers innocuously huddled by a wall. Each piece, each object is deliberately poised with gentle intent, its purpose and meaning is not for you, per se, but this offer of loving, simple care is intentional, confessional; it asks for your reciprocation, begs projection and reading out from oneself towards its mysteries and in reflective trans-substantiating emptiness it promotes your own.

“…poets speak words softly echoing rhymes from the walls, choirs open with song hailing holy from a congregation of speakers innocuously huddled by a wall.”

Returning weeks later, the experience is different, softer. What strikes is the spaces between the sounds and songs. These snatched prayers, enunciating periodically, each to its own rhythm and cadence, sounding alone and yet coming together in strange loops and concatenations, in their intermixing create new prayers, new song. Yet these moments of borrowed revelation are only temporary, as each shrine fades and silence returns.

For the vast majority of the show’s duration, the musician Laraaji is absent. Intermittently during the first few days of the opening, he performed, was in session, singing gongs and matriculating mantras to sooth the souls of art seekers presenting themselves. And yet, his corner, his shrine, orange Krishna mat, objects of devotion and worship, photos of holy men, buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, is empty. Our guru, the show’s guru, the object of our worship even is absent.

Fresh flowers, beautifully arranged into wall mounted offerings and displayed on plinths towards the end of the show’s small circuit have slowly dried out and died during the exhibition’s course. Dead flowers, withering away, cut from the stem. A poignant reminder of our own mortality, once our cords are cut, ours is an irreversible passing.

For all its soul raising beauty and devotional warmth, A Time for New Dreams carries at its heart a simple unwavering truth, a warning and a reminder, an invitation even: that our blossoming lacks durance and without our devotional enunciations, loves and hopes and the daring to dream, this gallery of our lives, no matter how crowded, falls cold and empty.

In the word of Ben Okri’s Invocation for the shrine III:

The revelations come fast With the harvest of the spirits. The world is not as it seems. Free yourselves from the illusion of limits.

Here are miracles unseen. Time turning the limits of the past Into new Freedom. Redream The chains into fires that last.

Saint Time speaks from the shrine Of the hours; speaks of the powers Of the blacks who are free and can dream. Free to weave power from the flowers

Bring a clear dream for the world You who walk this way. Bring your light. Bring your wisdom, your fire, your hope. Bring a new courage and a new fight.