Avery Singer considers 9/11 trauma and corporate anonymity at Hauser & Wirth

The image of 9/11 is viscerally stamped into collective memory. Media photographs of planes impacting, buildings collapsing, and bodies falling have been so widely proliferated that those who weren’t in New York may feel as though they saw the attack firsthand. Avery Singer’s ‘Free Fall’ at Hauser & Wirth London, coinciding with Frieze London 2023, offers a new perspective. The installation tangles together the artist’s childhood memories of the Twin Towers, in which her mother worked; her own trauma following the attack; and the survivors made famous through widely distributed press images. 

Both Hauser & Wirth’s Saville Row galleries have been turned, floor to ceiling, into office spaces. One gallery houses a long corridor that winds into the main room; the other, an imposing wall of elevators. The windows are panelled to match those of the towers, with 18in gaps meant to combat vertigo. ‘Corporate aesthetic in the last few decades hasn’t changed that much. It’s all beige, neutral tones,’ says the artist. ‘It’s oppressive and ugly but also calming.’

‘Avery Singer: Free Fall’ at Hauser & Wirth London

This serene space is punctured by moments of horror. The floor of one gallery is covered with shredded paper. A small painting shows a close-up pepper spray can, referencing the artist’s fear of walking through the streets at night. ‘I was seeing people get into fights, beat each other up and chase each other down,’ she says. ‘It was all anyone talked about for weeks. New York felt really injured but also very united.’ 

Another painting depicts a giant disembodied hand, with protruding flesh and bone. ‘My best friend, months later, told me that when she was finally allowed to go home, she went to her room and someone’s hand was on her windowsill,’ she says. ‘She didn’t know what to do, who to tell. We’re so desensitised to hyperreal violence on screen, but when we actually see it, it becomes something else.’ 

The exhibition includes portraits created from gaming avatars, which are digitally altered and applied to canvas using an intricate technique that creates a textureless surface onto which the image is projected. Marcy Borders, the ‘dust lady’ (so called due to the shot of her fleeing the Towers covered in ash and dust), is shown opposite Stan Honda, who photographed her. Singer has also created a portrait of Rachel Uchitel, who was recorded after 9/11 with a flier for her missing fiancé. Both women struggled with addiction in the following years, the former to drugs and alcohol, the latter to love. ‘The two of them had this loss and tragedy,’ says Singer. ‘How do you cope? How do you recover? I felt a kinship. They were women struggling with surviving something and then turning to addiction.’ 

For most people, 9/11 was seen through a distant lens. Singer brings viewers inside the buildings, adding reflections to the eyes of her avatars, who gaze at offices, computers, and cubicles. ‘It’s one of the last traumatic events in the Western world that happened before social media,’ says Singer. ‘Now mass shooters go on Facebook and livestream it.’

The artist lived in the financial district before the attack and has erected a fully functioning gallery bookstore in homage to her loved local shop that was destroyed. ‘It is very emotional for me,’ she considers. ‘For ten years I had panic attacks every time an airplane went overhead because I heard the first one hit the building. As more time has gone by, I can deal with it as subject matter. It’s not looking for closure, it’s just accepting things in life and moving forwards.’

‘Avery Singer: Free Fall’ takes place 10 October – 22 December 2023 at Hauser & Wirth, London

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