Miami artist’s crowd-control work not for the faint-hearted

“I’ve been reading a lot of police manuals,” says the Miami-based artist Antonia Wright, who has taken the metal police barrier as a starting point for a performative sculpture in her show, Control. Visitors to a performance at Spinello Projects on Monday night entered through a darkened corridor and signed a waiver warning of possible disfigurement and death before being ushered into a darkened gallery divided by a 22ft-long metal barricade. With no warning, another barrier—propelled by an unseen pressurised piston so powerful it had to be bolted to the gallery’s concrete floor—came flying out of the dark and slammed into the divider. “I wanted to mirror the [societal] violence happening now but recontextualise it so that we can process it,” Wright says. “The opposite of control is resistance.” Performances continue until 10 December.