Diana Al-Hadid's 'Reverse Collider' Exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery Features Ruinous Tower Sculptures

Diana Al-Hadid's exhibition 'Reverse Collider' at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York City ran from September 4 to October 9, 2008, with locations at 527 West 23rd Street and 534 West 24th Street. The show included three large sculptures, a wall installation, and drawings depicting elaborately engineered towers in states of ruin, decay, or catastrophic meltdown. Al-Hadid, born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1981 and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, explores themes of arrested hubris and the demise of powerful systems through baroque structures. Her work references medieval architecture, the Bible, and astro and nuclear physics, including the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, Breughel's Tower of Babel, and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. One sculpture, 'The Tower of Infinite Problems' (2008), filled the project space on West 24th Street with a fractured spire lying on its side, fabricated from honeycomb-like mesh. The exhibition's timing evoked associations with September 11, 2001, and Al-Hadid's Arab-American identity. A review of the show first appeared in the New York Sun on September 18, 2008, under the heading 'Frozen Instants of Failure.'