Taliesin Gilkes-Bower, Wrong Earth (3025) at Goldsmiths, University of London, London

Wrong Earth (3025) by Taliesin Gilkes-Bower, at Goldsmiths, University of London, London, 17/07/2025–22/07/2025.

We’re in the year 3025, perhaps, or in a time-dislocated scenario where a lone body moves through debris and leftover devices, trying to decipher a message left hanging in the air. In the acid blue of the room, silence is not empty but radiant, as if someone, somewhere, is still trying to reach out with a forgotten signal. Time has been fractured. Taliesin Gilkes-Bower doesn’t stage a future, but a kind of reincarnation of memory through ritual. Wrong Earth (3025) is the hypothesis of a return, only to the wrong planet. Not dystopia, not apocalypse, but a misfiring of coordinates, existential, cosmic, mythological.

The exhibition unfolds as a sensory chamber crossed by cold pulses and ominous glows. Every object appears to have survived a lost purpose, measuring instruments, radio transmissions, technical drapes, survival tents, and a series of sculptures that function less as machines and more as altars. An abandoned helmet inside a red tent, two uncertain water jugs, electric sparks leaping from suspended cylinders. Near the altar-like structure, a 3D print of a Roman marble from the first century, originally a young boy holding a dog, has been reworked so that the printer’s support structures remain, mutating into a tentacular, quasi-hentai excrescence. It becomes a symbol of the invisible traumas harbored in the body, and of how technology entwines itself with the nervous system. Beneath this creaturely form sits the flight recorder of a crashed Eurofighter Typhoon, a black box that, paradoxically, embodies our desperate grip on past narratives, as if reconstructing them perfectly might unlock a new truth about the present, though we access its data only once destruction is complete.

Contrary to the appearance of silence, the space is animated by three distinct sound sources. Inside the large horn-shaped sculpture, a loop of I Only Have Eyes for You by The Flamingos plays like a ritual invocation of human memory and connection. As it degrades, it shifts toward a trance-like transmission, half-mesmeric signal from a nonhuman intelligence, half-protective talisman installed by the Surveyor who set it looping.

Suspended fluorescent bulbs flicker to life under the activation of Tesla coils, whose electric crackling forms a polyrhythmic counterpoint to the other audio sources, to the fluctuating lights, and to the movements of the fog.

The third sound source, transmitted sporadically through the five radios scattered across the room, is a sequence of increasingly frantic, and later eerily casual, radio calls from the Surveyor attempting to reach their team. The transmission jumps from radio to radio, fracturing the narrative into shards that need to be heard repeatedly to be fully pieced together, especially as the audio’s progressive degradation makes coherence elusive.

The entire environment behaves like a reparative ritual. The Surveyor, central yet unseen, is a solitary witness performing gestures that hover between the ceremonial and the technical, the sacred and the malfunctioning. The materials, industrial scrap electronics, military-grade metal, worn plastics, are familiar, yet have been transfigured into secular totems of a forgotten cult. Gilkes-Bower doesn’t build installations, they construct post-collapse liturgies.

The violet fog drifting through the rooms evokes not only atmosphere but a perceptual trance, where time, sense, and space fold into one another. The exhibition does not transmit, it harbors. The works do not explain or narrate. They wait. The viewer does not follow a storyline but enters a condition, that of the impossible return, of language interrupted, of reality heard only as echo.

It feels as though we’ve stumbled upon an alien altar after the ritual has ended. Everything has already been said, but in a language that no longer belongs to us. All that remains is the gesture, the stance, the sound we never quite heard.

FW

Website: taliesingilkesbower.com

Instagram: @realms.manifest