Thanks to their tongue-in-cheek visually bombastic show Gloria at the U.S. Pavilion, the Puerto-Rican duo Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla have become just about the most discussed artists of the ongoing 54th Venice Biennale.
At Art Basel, their installation from 2010, titled Scale of Justice Carried by Shore Foam, has been selected as one of the projects for the Art Unlimited exhibition. The biggest part of the sculpture consists of synthetic polymer foam (go behind the sculpture and try touching it, it's disgustingly sticky!) with a scale of justice balancing on the top - the foam symbolizing the large number of recent man-made ecological disasters. As stated in the press release:
The image of foam by the seashore has come to occupy the public imaginary more prominently in recent years as a result of countless media depictions of man-made catastrophes – from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the now annual flooding worldwide caused by global warming. With these ecological events cutting across national and territorial borders, the scale of justice has become an object of explicit struggle. Presented here in sculptural form, this ephemeral froth stands as the remains of something that has come to pass, frozen in time, with the final balance of the scale left undetermined.