Review: Strictly ballroom

SILVIO WOLF ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL LONDON

SILVIO WOLF'S installation, The Elsewhere, gives a whole new meaning to the term "site specific": there's not a lot to see here apart from the site. In fact, the Royal Festival Hall Ballroom, which is playing host to the Italian artist's first solo show in the UK, is completely empty, and if it weren't for a helpful sign on one of the entrance pillars the exhibit might pass you by altogether.

There is a sound-track playing: the sound of children crying, calling out to each other, yelling and squealing in true playground fashion, which rains down on you from the ceiling, as if the children were hovering above you just out of sight. There is also a new, constant light source, specially installed to give a timeless quality by denying the changing times of day outside. But apart from these two elements the Ballroom is unaltered.

"I'm fascinated by the personality that a specific place is capable of expressing, and I'm increasingly obsessed by the need to establish a symbolic relationship with such a place," explains Wolf, who lives and works in Milan. The recording of the children's voices was originally made for an art space in Milan that was once a refectory in the city's 18th-century orphanage for girls.

"I wasn't just interested in giving evidence to the lost traces and memory of the place, but with giving a new form, life and presence to the vanished community of girls who lived there," he says.

A series of bemused-looking, dark-suited men wandered into the middle installation while I was there, stared at the ceiling as if that held all the answers and then beat a hasty retreat, each and every one looking distinctly uncomfortable. But then, a walk around the exhibit is slightly unnerving, surrounded as it is on three sides by the bar area, the customers of which stare on impassively at the live entertainment before them. The space is vast, its towering white pillars calling to mind the impressive height and scale of those in Egyptian temples, its emptiness and noise accentuated by the subdued, adult presence of those clustered around its edges.

Fortunately, there is an accompanying CD-Rom, being presented as an artwork in its own right, which does flesh out the rather bare bones of the exhibit. At the click of a mouse, you can access information about the RFH and the artist, which includes his biography and examples of his previous works, and you can navigate the installation itself in true playground fashion.

The constant light and looped sound of The Elsewhere, however, is exhausting after a while. Twenty-four hours of this drip of constant noise would surely send you mad, particularly as the calm, empty setting should be silent and peaceful. And does this treatment of the Ballroom mean that all spaces are potential works of art? If that's the case, a reconstruction of my living-room, with an accompanying tape of all the arguments of the successive neighbours who have lived in the flat upstairs, would count. After all, as Wolf argues, "the place becomes the event".

Kate Mikhail