carlier | gebauer is proud to present Mark Wallinger’s fourth solo show at the gallery.  Steine, 2010. One thousand numbered stones cover the floor in the main room. What is this a system of ordering? What happens if we give a thing a number? It is no taxonomy, being precisely nonsensical, inscribing the futility of the task of understanding on intransigent matter. These stones, with their inherent contrast of human labour and the monumental timescale of geology, catalyse thoughts of mortality, of catalogues of the vanished and the anonymous. 

There is unease here as there is in contemplating the surrounding photographs – camera phone snaps taken from websites dedicated to images of unknown people who have fallen asleep on public transport. Now these stolen souls, grotesquely magnified, make up The Unconscious, 2010. Liberated from the tense consciousness of the waking state, their faces seem to exist somewhere beyond them, and yet, following an unconscious ordering principle, they resemble themselves more in this lapsed state than when awake. Wallinger’s inversions of individual and social consciousness are continued in a series of further compositions in this exhibition.