Nabuqi employs an array of manufactured and readymade objects in Destination, a work first created in 2018 and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Scaffold rigging, lights, a range of artificial plants, and a large-scale printed image that could be taken from a stock photo album combine to create a theatrically lit billboard that seems to be advertising a Photoshop-perfect tropical getaway.

Sited on the busy Montreal Street facing the northbound traffic, Destination even mirrors the placement of streetside advertising. Passed at speed, the absurdity of the situation may catch the corner of the eye, however, on foot, the full strangeness becomes apparent. The individual elements of the work seem to be miscast or are misbehaving despite the roles they have been given in the creation of an imaginary island dream. The plastic foliage protrudes through a gaping hole in the surface of the billboard; the lights, which should provide constant and consistent illumination flicker on and off.

In the context of this Season’s theme, Shadows Cast, which explores the illusory possibilities of our image-saturated environment, Destination can be read as a challenge to the way in which our perceptions and expectations are constructed by media stereotypes, cliches, and flattened representations. Destination manages to provoke, while also offering a dose of gallows humour. In our current predicament, where we are disconnected from the rest of the world, and them from us, Destination promises a form of surreal escapism into a world of decorative absurdity, competing with reality in not quite living up to the promise of the fantasy.