The Anniversary Editions series celebrates Chisenhale Gallery’s historic exhibitions programme, highlighting seminal solo shows that the gallery has commissioned, produced and presented since the early 1980s. Marking 25 years since her 1991 exhibition Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, Parker’s edition is the inaugural artwork in the Anniversary Editions series. The Anniversary Editions series builds upon Chisenhale Gallery’s collection of Archive Editions, which include works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Whiteread, Hilary Lloyd, Mark Leckey and Jordan Wolfson. All proceeds contribute to Chisenhale Gallery’s artistic programme, supporting the next generation of pioneering artists.

Widely considered her breakthrough show, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View remains one of Parker’s most celebrated works to date. Subsequently Parker produced a major solo exhibition, The Maybe, at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995 and was nominated for the 1997 Turner Prize. She continues to make sculptural, site-specific works that transform familiar, representational objects into abstracted forms. In recent years, her large-scale installations have included War Room (2015) at the Whitworth Gallery and Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) (2016), commissioned for the Roof Garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Since her 1991 exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Parker’s complex and moving work has earned her recognition as one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists.

Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View opened to the public on 18 September 1991 at Chisenhale Gallery. The installation consisted of a garden shed and its miscellaneous domestic contents, which had been blown up by the British Army at the artist’s request. After this brutal yet controlled act, the altered objects were suspended in a state of collective flux. Encircling a single light bulb, the constellation of debris created a dramatic shadow play on the surrounding gallery walls. For Parker, the garden shed represented a “reservoir of stuff,” operating as a metaphor for psychological baggage. The explosion formalised Parker’s emotional investigation, causing a devastating transformation of the physical objects. This act, at once destructive and productive, referenced the cosmological theory of the Big Bang.

Parker’s Anniversary Edition comprises three black and white photographs of domestic objects: a hot water bottle, a sun parasol and a record player. The images, each depicting a component of Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, have been carefully selected by the artist. The original photographs were shot by Hugo Glendinning, in order to document the process of producing the work. They were taken at Chisenhale Gallery prior to the elements being suspended in the final presentation of the piece, serving as an inventory of the blown-up contents of the shed.

For Parker, these photographs resonate with both past and present conflict. As she explains, “At the time, the background was the IRA bombing. It was 1991 and there were bombs going off in London. […] Now it’s a different kind of terrorist threat but in the end the results are the same.” [1] Like iconic war photography, these images have a timeless quality, depicting not one explosion but the universal idea of an explosion.