Your Upbringing brought you down

For more than 10 years, English artist Ryan Gander has been creating ambitious conceptual works, the philosophy behind them being to ‘render the invisible visible’. For each work, he makes new free associations between the meanings of the objects he uses and their materials. Your Upbringing brought you down, 2010, consists of a broken 16mm projector that projects an image with a hair caught in the machine, the film having spilled to the floor. On the film that we cannot see are images of a traditional procession in Tamsweg, Austria. The main character in this procession is the giant puppet of Samson, famous for his long hair and its link to his superhuman strength. The film unwound on the floor recalls Samson’s cut hair. All that remains of his strength is one single hair, stuck on the lens, like a metaphor for the fragility of power.