Ballardian

Guardian columnist Jean Hannah Edelstein reviews the 12 Steps Down exhibition, recently mentioned on ballardian.com:

The little I’d read about the exhibition made me naively expect a large pile of sand in the midst of a damp and mouldy cellar. While the mould is indeed resplendent (the smell, appropriately grotesque) the approach is not explicitly interpretative or collaborative. Rather, the installation is more of a pastiche of individual artists’ impressionistic reactions to the text: childlike sketches of the giant’s body parts; a line of disembodied footprints trailing down a staircase to nowhere; an audio reel of violent retching juxtaposed with a projection of a CCTV video of a massive construction site, with scrolling text across a PC screen providing commentary.
…
Ballard’s text itself gets slightly short shrift - my word-centric brain would have appreciated some notes on how the artists worked with the narrative as their point of departure. But despite this, the exhibit evoked exactly the same guttural, unsettled feeling in me that the story does. Rather than find the experience didactic, I’m prompted now to read the story yet again and see how my own response has now been altered.