life, and one to which he attributed the setting of his novel. Just as Shanghai and London might have provided the blueprint for Ballard, so Venice provides for Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos a city already in thrall to the salty inundations of the surrounding lagoon and where it’s inhabitants can no longer live lightly on its surfaces. Paddy identifies Ballard’s novel as an example of the ‘recovery narrative’ often prevalent in the science fiction genre, reclaiming lost Eden from the invasion of the alien and non-human and often with an ‘implicitly imperial metanarrative’ (p.61). The faceted surfaces of PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos’s Polyptychs assemblages refract and absorb these complex questions of past crimes and future actions. But in their careful arrangements, configured in the gallery, or photographed against the walls of the city’s waterways, the Polyptychs operate as small and concentrated fragments of the wider narrative of history and commerce which has brought us to this precipitous point.
Lucy Reynolds | researcher, curator and artist Senior Lecturer, Westminster School of Arts London, March 2022