Nayan Kulkarni’s Blade is a site specific public artwork in the middle of Queen Victoria Square in Hull, England, as part of the UK’s 2017 City of Culture celebration. The B75 roto at the heart of the work was one of the first manufactured by Hull’s new Siemens factory. The blade itself is a pre-made industrial object. The temporary works beauty is in the contrast between the city center and the 25 tone monolith.
“It is striking to interrupt the new shiny logics of Queen Victoria Square with an industrial artifact that both exposes the city’s economic path dependency and the UK’s increasing reliance on corporate sponsorship to maintain cultural energy,” explains Kulkarni. “That is not to say that it [Blade] doesn’t celebrate the labor of Hull in a new way. But through folding cultural production into industrial production I think that their is a gentle pointer towards a critique.”