Simon Starling: Under Lime

In his provocative installation works, UK conceptualist Simon Starling tells stories about natural and cultural processes of transformation. He displaces, inverts, reserves and remakes existing things with self-conscious, ironic amateurishness. He is a tinkerer with objects of design and bits of history, an alchemist of arcana and late modernism, according Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times. This volume presents three projects by Starling: in Kakteenhaus, (2002), an Andalusian cactus is transplanted to Berlin’s winter, where a converted automotive engine ensures its survival; Plant Room (2008) creates a mud-brick chamber for sensitive historical photographs; and for Under Lime (2009), Starling cut a lime branch from the nearby Unter den Linden boulevard and grafted it beneath the Kunsthalle’s rafters.