“Seasons in Hell” marks the final chapter in a trilogy of works by British artist Zoe Williams, which began with her solo exhibition “Fondant” (Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, 2023) and was followed by the performance Smears of the Night (Society in Disguise), (a collaboration between Williams and artist Nadja Voorham at the Museum of Art and History, Geneva, 2024). Through this trilogy, Williams has created a series of immersive, crafted cinematic environments, which play with her ongoing interest in exploring the notions of camp, class, taste, excess, and eroticism.
Throughout each of these chapters, the artist has created an evolving “script,” dramatising interactions between set, body and object and ultimately the viewer, intertwining her key concerns around the notions of power, desire, artifice, and consumption. These recurring themes and objects are imbued with a sense of theatricality inherent to the artist’s work, which turns the spaces they inhabit into stages for the intimate psychodramas that may or may not occur. The dramaturgy is built on a prolonged tension, a dynamic interplay between sensuality and repulsion, and a teasing anticipation, with desires seeming to linger just on the verge of fulfillment.
“Seasons in Hell” represents the final, declining act of the trilogy, capturing the slow decay of once decadent interiors and intimate selves. It seems to hint at the aftermath of dramatic events whose characters have vanished, yet their heady presence remains palpable in the space, transfigured into objects, scent, and sound. The overall ambiance is simultaneously dark, theatrical, intoxicating, and eerie.
A dim, putrid-green light bathes the walls, while a haunting, at points overtly romantic soundtrack fills the room, blending with a sweet, cloying musky scent. These elements insidiously creep into our ears and nostrils, heightening the sense of nausea, sickness, and decay lingering in the room. Our gaze is drawn to the room’s centerpiece: a seemingly lavish bed framed with luxurious satin curtains and eroticaly charged Polaroid prints. The scene is set for an intimate melodrama that seems to have already unfolded amid the stained dusk-mauve satin sheets. It is unclear if we are witnessing the remains of a solitary malaise, the aftermath of a lovers tryst or something altogether more sinister. Scattered throughout the vast space are lavishly grotesque ceramic sculptures, like strange clues or characters themselves. There are candy-colored piss pots, melting Rococo-styled shoes and boots, platters of disfigured body parts, blind mirrors, and unseeing eyes—all relics of repressed or unfulfilled desires, petrified smears of intention.
Zoe Williams’ solitary stage vividly captures fragments of intimacy—intense connections, permeable boundaries, smudges, and leakages—both literal and metaphorical—teetering on the fine line between fusion and contamination. It also witnesses painful disenchantment, loss, and alienation, with a crumbling melancholy that is overwhelming as much as it is unbearable.
at Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
until November 3, 2024