Wielebinski's Overlapping Worlds

The exhibition's title, The Red Sun is High, the Blue Low, is taken from a 1978 essay by science fiction writer and critic Samuel R. Delany. Delany uses the sentence as an example of the corrective and revisionary process of reading science fiction, in which "each new word revises the complex picture we had a moment before." The title functions as a fitting analogy for Wielebinski's installation environment in which overlapping worlds feel both familiar and strange. The ICA's Lower Gallery and Reading Room will contain various sculptural and readymade objects, paintings, audio and architectural elements, each of which solicits - through direct interaction or quiet imposition - our individual responses and our collective behaviour. ICA London will present the first solo institutional exhibition of cross-disciplinary artist Gray Wielebinski in September 2023. The exhibition will feature all new site-specific work across painting, sculpture, installation and sound addressing the complex state of individual agency today, specifically investigating anxieties underpinning apocalypticism, simulation and the systems that mediate our behaviour. Expanding Wielebinski's exploration of the boundaries of private and public spaces, with references spanning sci-fi, Cold War legacies and games, the exhibition transforms the ICA into an investigation of constructed worlds within worlds. In doing so, Wielebinski responds to the ICA neighbours on The Mall: Buckingham Palace, St. James's Park, and the Admiralty Citadel.