The Hyper Bowl was conceived as a challenge to the overuse and overreliance of exaggerated or hyperbolic language within society. Particularly but not exclusively with the run up to the American election, the Hyper Bowl acted as a kind of sage warning against what might be around the corner.
Below, you will find text that accompanied the installation, a parody of Challenger's own press and biography sending herself up, alongside her targets within the bowl itself that ranged from art to advertising hyperbole, the EU Referendum to North Korean propaganda.
"...the paramount walk-in art for the age of Trump." Mike Wade for The Times, Aug 2016.
**** “sensational”
***** “art star and prodigy”
***** “compelling”
OMG, this ingenious brand new best-ever installation by dynamic, polymath, “artist agitator” Tamsyn Challenger will be housed in the spectacular, cavernous, intuitive basement space at world famous venue Summerhall. A concept such as ‘Hyper Bowl’ comes around once in a lifetime and could be the greatest contemporary art work of a generation.
“I am literally dying to see the historic construction of a sculptural ‘bowl’ that holds a soup of re-fabricated text.” (Mary Beard might have said this, BBC, 2016)
The meteoric rise of hyperbole is the game and we are the players. The Hyper Bowl housed the most amazing live performance event of the festival on Sunday 21st Aug in which top comedians battled it out with legendary poets, writers and art critics to see who was the hyperbolic bomb. Hero, icon, poet and sought after lecturer Colin Herd was the ring master, participants included Elvis, Arthur Smith, Michael Pedersen, Stephen Fry, Stuart Kelly, Cleopatra, Debs Newbold, Brian Sewell, Joanna Walsh, Gracie Fields, Gareth K Vile, Joan Rivers, Dali, Grant O'Rourke, George Clooney, JL Williams, and Liza Tarbuck (some participants not inc.).
#RIPsubtlety
The Bowl BIOG
Tamsyn Challenger’s award-winning exhaustive practise has led to her being described as “the next Tracey Emin”, alongside many other young female artists.
Commercially ambiguous, her thrilling ‘outsider’ status has seen her crowd pleasing installations internationally applauded and placed in the Guardian’s Top 5. A journalist said of her recently that “she is the most famous, unfamous artist on the planet right now”, adding that he wasn’t sure that he could think of that many famous visual artists. During her seminal 15 year residency in London she was the innovator behind the now celebrated and globally renowned ‘Haringey Set’. She is one of the last artists ever to breathe the sacred ‘Bacon Air’ left circulating the defunct Colony Rooms in Soho. A “Challenger” by name and nature, DON’T MISS THIS UNMISSABLE ARTIST WHILST SHE’S STILL ALIVE.
