I last visited an art gallery on 25 February 2020, more than a year ago. In that time I’ve looked through all of my photobooks, re-hung my limited selection of reproductions and posters and gaffa-taped a banana to my wall, but none of these have replicated visiting an actual gallery.
Luckily the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has a solution for me – and for anyone feeling deprived of art. The ‘Do it’ initiative he started in 1993 along with the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier has been expanded for lockdown times, with more artists adding to the project. Each artist’s contribution takes the form of a set of instructions, some more conceptual (Virgil Abloh’s asks us to ‘Understand the nature of man’), some more concrete (Thao Nguyen Phan asks us to ‘Dig a hole, plant a seed’). These instructions are published on the Serpentine Galleries’ Twitter page and through a site on Google Arts & Culture. Stuck at home during the third UK national lockdown, I decided to follow through on a few of these sets of instructions; perhaps I could turn my home into an art gallery.