Massive Zorb Boil

By Sammi Gale

On its by turns craggy, clotty and slick surface, Anish Kapoor’s Hayward Gallery exhibition is an attempt to produce the sublime. Standing before something vast, overwhelming and beyond comprehension, ordinary perception is interrupted and the viewer should be stopped in her tracks. But these artworks have the opposite effect: staged one after the other, the encounters are propulsive.

"blood blimp"

Upon entering the gallery, an inflated PVC membrane filling the six-metre-high space rebuffs the viewer, threatening to bounce her right back out the door, an effect that is compounded in my case because the invigilator has asked me to wear my backpack on my front, leaving me feeling as though I had been fitted with a sumoesque prosthesis, a false belly ready for some slapstick collision. Titled All of Nothing (2026), this blood blimp or blistery bouncy castle; this – build your own metaphor by adding bodily fallout to a vehicle for entertainment that could hold its own at a county fair – intragastric balloon-themed soft play area forces you to the edges of the room and shivvies you into the next faster than you can say ‘massive zorb boil’. 

Where All of Nothing threatens expansion — like Donald Barthelme’s famous balloon, growing until it occupies the entire city and onto the entire universe — the next room turns towards collapse, a series of black holes lining the walls. This is John Milton’s ‘darkness visible’ rebranded for the techbro era as ‘Vantablack’, a material the artist patented (and if the thrilling worlds of proprietary rights and pigments are your bag, do check out the ongoing blackest black beef here.) Invited to stare into the void — as if the News App is not enough — the eye sinks into something that feels visually unreachable, as the brain, giving up on texture and highlights that refuse to appear, submits. But once you have experienced this effect, the repetition in the other Vantablack voids here begins to weaken it, not unlike discovering you have photographed the same thing twenty times on your phone and cannot decide which images to delete. The thing that should feel infinite becomes another item in a sequence. So, straight on through we go. 

"both mountain and knife-tip"

Upstairs, the exhibition’s centrepiece, the huge Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), an inverted mountain titled after the site where God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, hovers inches above the floor. Point down, the sculpture is both mountain and knife-tip. Horrifying yet theatrical, coated in reds and blacks — the set-piece-y-ness, the inverted triangle and the colour combination conspiring to summon, from some unreliable archive of my visual memory, Michael Jackson's Thriller jacket — the sculpture cannot be taken in from a single viewpoint, and the viewer must circle it. As I do, I film, partly because I have internalised the belief that writing about something now involves creating the conditions for other people to encounter it on social media, partly because that is true, and partly out of habit. Somewhere behind me a woman is doing the same thing, and I find myself annoyed she has ruined how thrilling this could all look, on camera. This is the contemporary problem of the sublime. Far easier to imagine raising the knife on Schmisaac than sacrificing the small rectangle through which I experience almost everything else. Three large blood-clot-like forms are wrapped in plastic that reflects the overhead lights. Some more All of Nothing bulges in. 

"the surrounding red seems to radiate"

Up another flight of stairs there is more red, so much of it, and with surfaces the eye skitters off rather than settles on, that the exhibition signage pings out, visually novel: a warning that the pigment may stain your clothes, do not touch, the red general prohibition sign round a black hand symbol another rebuttal. Inspired by the sacred Australian sandstone monolith, Uluru, the red of Ha Makom (2026) is hyper-saturated, velvety, inherently vivid. Kapoor has set an absolute, light-swallowing black opening at the crest of this red mass: the brain's contrast processing confounded, the surrounding red seems to radiate by comparison.

A quick turn around big red Uluru, and onto the terrace, where the sun bounces too blindingly off the mirror works to look at for long. The final room holds a series titled Ritual Expiation, forms that resemble entrails slopped across an abattoir floor. By this point, my tour through bodily horror and spiritual symbolism has occurred at such speed, there is the impression of a theme park — and it would be a Stranger Things–themed one, vaguely Gothic, red tentacles spilling everywhere, and pairs well with an 80s soundtrack.

Why the sublime? Just as Kapoor patented the blackest black, perhaps it is his penchant for superlatives that draws him to what Edmund Burke called ‘the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.’ Historically, that mental overload once resolved itself in God, but as the sublime entered modern culture, particularly through Romanticism, the source of awe shifted from divine power toward nature, art, and the self. Without God to land on in the face of the irreconcilable, the self stepped in. 

This might explain my discomfort with Kapoor's exhibition. There is too much of him, and of me. The viewer arrives expecting expansion — the old promise that art might modestly enlarge consciousness, might briefly remove us from ourselves. Instead, the exhibition keeps returning us to our own bodies – especially to our own viscera. We are not the balloon expanding into infinity. We are the small object pushed toward the edge of the room. And in the next one, and the next one. 

As such, the exhibition also reveals how difficult that older experience has become. The mountain hangs above us. The blackest black absorbs our gaze. The red pigment appears to glow. Myself and others pull out our phones to collect the experience. The contemporary sublime is no longer the moment the mind tingles before infinity. It is the moment we notice how hard it has become to stop moving.