Wring ring

For the young art lover: there was a time when mobile phones didn’t exist and people would make phone calls in phone booths on the street when they were on the go. The British artist who created ‘Wring ring’ is called Alex Chinneck and was born in 1984. He knows the telephone booths from his youth and because people in England think they still belong in the streetscape, they did not all disappear.

Alex Chinneck is known for his large-scale, site-specific art installations that playfully, and often surrealistically, combine architecture and sculpture. He transforms everyday objects and buildings into spectacular visual paradoxes. He made bricks melt, stones float, and four-story buildings bend and unzip.

The phone booth in ‘Wring ring’ rotates 720 degrees and is part of a series in which Chinneck transforms iconic street furniture into pop art. A recurring theme in this is that the artist challenges our understanding of familiar objects and materials. ‘Wring ring’ is a follow-up to his knotted mailbox ‘Alphabetti Spaghetti’, which appeared overnight in several British cities in 2019.

For his phone booth, Chinneck appears to have twisted half a ton of metal into a rotating form, including the small windows that also rotate. You can see the work as a playful addition to Gelderlandplein, but also as an object that makes the ordinary extraordinary, thereby challenging the expectations and limitations in your thinking.