Like Taking Sand to The Beach. beach sand, tarpaulin, vinyl lettering, polyurethane bags, spray paint. 2006.
Almost a ton of sand was excavated from a beach in The Bahamas - carefully bagged, weighed, recorded for transport - to the Nassauischer Kunstverein gallery in Wiesbaden, Germany. In a gallery space of the same size the beach was meticulously reconstructed as a participative installation open to the public. At the end of the exhibition the sand was returned in the same methodical fashion to the exact location of its origin.
"Like Taking Sand to the Beach is a deconstruction of a marketable Eden from the inside out. Curry has dissected the tourist brochure to its basic components, separated the element of sand physically and metaphorically from a system of relations that has given it meaning and exported it, duty free, to a market that has been taught to desire it and know it always from a distance."
beach section and gallery size: 11.68 by 15.65 feet/3.56 by 4.77 metres
sand collected: 1779 3/4 lbs/808.98 kilos
sand displaced by gallery visitors: 508 3/4 lbs/231.25 kilos
sand returned to beach: 1271 lbs/577.73 kilos
round trip distance travelled: 9431.68 miles/15178.38 kilometres