The Brooklyn Rail

If ever there were a near-perfect union between an artist’s practice and the soul of an exhibition venue, it would be Daniel Turner’s current installation at the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Museum of Contemporary Arts (MACS) at Grand-Hornu in Belgium. Its pristine galleries are housed within an architectural complex that once served as a colliery, now designated a World Heritage site. This history interlocks well with the archeological tenor of Turner’s work—anchored in “sourcing materials, sifting for materials, and extracting materials.” Nevertheless, after surveying the terrain, the artist fastened upon a different structure: the Forest Prison, seventy-three kilometers away in Brussels. Long emblematic of the overcrowded prisons in Belgium, it was not closed until 2022. And, unlike the mechanization of labor at the colliery—a site that, to the artist, had long since gone cold—Turner sensed that the reduction of human beings to mere numbers at the Forest Prison was still raw and palpable. The resulting show, spanning MACS full 9,800 feet, is a powerful emotional experience that resonates beyond its immediate subject. It also speaks to the increasing dehumanization of man in the contemporary world.

From the minute one enters this exhibition, it is evident how much thought Turner has given to the relationship between the space and the elements he placed within it. Consider the four large vitrines awaiting contemplation in the first gallery. The initial one presents two plans of “cell-based” Forest Prison from 1907 and 1908, a newspaper clipping featuring an aerial shot of the building (1919), and a prison bulletin from December 1947, opened to three photographs. In two photographs, we see women operating knitting or sewing machines; the other features male detainees standing at attention. The remaining vitrines present a few objects sourced from the prison: links of pipe that once channeled heat to radiators, unused blankets still hermetically sealed, door handles, squeegees, and distressed wooden tabletops. The dialectic between functionality and senselessness is the operative force here. More than a dozen well-tooled door handles, clanking countless times—to no avail—by prisoners locked in tiny cells. Their isolation finds an equivalent in the conspicuous distance between these heaped latches and three encrusted squeegees, the sole elements of a second vitrine. In the last case, a large glass beaker filled with a viscous liquid sits far apart from a stack of deeply incised wooden tabletops. Visualize the sweating elbows and chests that once bent over those tables, carving into them with some sharp, secreted, instrument. Turner had one sent to his studio in New York. There, he methodically reduced it to sawdust. Then using a Soxhlet extractor, he drained every last drop of fluid from the material for weeks.

To reach the second gallery, one must navigate a series of cascading stone steps. At their bottom, a plateau opens into a small, low-ceilinged room. Its entire back wall is occupied by 110/220 (2024), a projected image of an endlessly running sewing machine. In the semi-darkness, there is nothing to focus on but its jabbing needle—threadless, piercing nothing. Turner has zoomed in so tightly that the rest of the machine disappears, amplifying its relentless, mechanical drive. A while into the thirty-six-minute loop of this video, its rhythmic plunging begins to evoke an unsettling needling away of individual identity. The reverberating sound of the machine is as unnerving as its tightly cropped image. Many will feel caught between trance-like fixation and the urge to turn away, even flee. Yet escape is not simple. One must either retrace the descending steps or mount an identical set, ascending. The space is unreal; one seems to have stepped into the shadow of Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony.

Once this claustrophobic space is left behind, three galleries lie ahead, two of them flooded with light. In the first we encounter Isofeed (2024), a large installation that features several mattresses, worktables, pitchers, pipes, metal shavings, and four now-dark sodium lamps mounted low on opposite gallery walls, all sourced from the prison. If these components call to mind a work by Joseph Beuys, so be it. But there is nothing utopian about Turner’s aesthetic, nor does it address the need to come to terms with a fraught collective past, as Beuys’s work sometimes does. Instead, Turner is preoccupied with exposing the cruel and often purposeless nature of humans transacting with one another, whether in prisons, mental institutions, or other controlled environments, including those embedded in our present world. For the artist, materials bear witness to what otherwise escapes description. As he recently put it: “I’ve always worked with discarded materials—playing their minor keys, distilling every drop out that I can.”

Two sculptures in the next gallery embody this approach: (de Forest) Radiator Bar 1 and 2 (both 2024). Together they consist of fifty melted down radiators that once heated the prison. Turner carefully calculated how many would be needed to form two iron bars, together weighing over one ton. Each was to measure 7 by 144 by 4 inches—dimensions dictated by the way the artist wanted them framed within a 150 by 24 by 15-foot gallery, separated from one another by a large expanse. Moving through this charged space, some may hear the bars intoning the unrelenting presence of a void. For Turner, that weighty phenomenon had reigned supreme at Forest Prison, eventually breaking even the most resilient inmates.

In the final gallery, Turner took one last strike at distilling the essence of that vacuum. Devoted entirely to Compresseur (2024), a four-channel digital video, the space is cavernous. Once inside, the viewer is bombarded with a rapid succession of 1,200 photographs taken by the artist during his prospecting of Forest Prison. They flash at the relentless pace of four per second. It is not so much these images that linger in memory. Instead, it’s the black intervals between them—the void ticking away to the tune of a clock, measuring absence as much as time. Ultimately, every element in this extraordinary exhibition is not merely in harmony but conspires to deliver a decisive, eye-opening blow.