Memory (Guggenheim New York, October 21, 2009–March 28, 2010)

A site-specific sculpture on display at the Guggenheim New York from October 21, 2009 to March 28, 2010, Anish Kapoor's Memory is a fascinatingly interactive work. An amorphous, raw shape constructed out of industrial Cor-Ten steel, Memory struggles to be contained in its hangar-sized room, defying gravity as it soars through empty space at some spots and bumping gently into the walls at others. The key is that the entire sculpture is too vast to be viewed from a single vantage point. This compels viewers to mentally connect the bits and pieces of the whole that their minds retain from glimpses at the various viewing areas. Kapoor describes this process as the creation of "a mental structure": viewers reconstruct the entire sculpture through the act of remembering (and forgetting) what they've already seen, making each viewer's experience of the piece entirely unique. This effort becomes tricky when the sculpture's vaguely threatening shapes and surfaces attract and repel at the same time. Finally, the sculpture has a square aperture, also seen as a painting, that provides a view into a vast and unfathomable darkness, an endless void that negates the sculpture's exterior. What once seemed too enormous to fully comprehend suddenly seems stunted.