NGA Contemporary

Until April 3

I have always been puzzled by the reference in the Book of Genesis, 19:26, where Lot's wife is punished for looking back at Sodom, against the wishes of the angels, and for this she was turned into a "pillar of salt".

The biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were places of excess and were situated near the Dead Sea, and these God destroyed. Today there are indeed large deposits of rock salt and several physical pillars of salt, any one of which could be identified with Lot's wife. The biblical metaphor remains powerful that for disobeying the will of the Lord, you can be turned into salt. Christ also alludes to this in the New Testament, when he reminds his audience of what happens if one disobeys God in the Gospel according to Luke 17:32.

Artists have for many years been interested in salt as a medium for sculpture; famously, the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland has been a huge tourist attraction with their salt sculptures, including a version of Leonardo's The Last Supper carved out of salt. The Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto creates sculptures and installations out of salt, some quite moving and associated with traditional Japanese funerary rituals. Salt is a physical and symbolic medium.

Ken and Julia Yonetani are two collaborative artists, both born in Tokyo in the early 1970s, who met while they worked as waiters at a restaurant in Tokyo. They began collaborating in 2008 and have experienced exceptional curatorial success. Their exhibition at NGA Contemporary brings together several distinct bodies of work, much of it dealing with salt. Their raw material, the salt, they have sourced from the Murray-Darling Freshwater Research Centre, where the salt is extracted in a battle with salinity.

The main piece in the exhibition is their much-exhibited The Last Supper (2014) that I initially caught at the Hazlehurst Regional Gallery near Sydney, the best part of two years ago. It subsequently has been shown in Bendigo, Tweed River and at the Bega Valley Regional Gallery. It is a nine-metre long monumental installation made out of salt, where a sumptuously laid table with an abundance of fruit, seafood, candles and chalices, amongst other things, may be interpreted as the new Sodom of excess now turned into a table of salt.

The scale and the craft involved in the enterprise are impressive, even if the allegorical dimension is a little obvious. The Biblical connotations of the title taps into a huge tradition of art history, but now shown as strangely depopulated, without Christ or apostles present. In a perverse manner I am reminded of the imagery of the Melbourne artist, George Baldessin, and his banquets for no eating series. The Yonetani Last Supper is a somewhat sombre affair, where there is no joy or feasting. It is an installation that is more impressive when viewed from a distance with the casting of the objects in salt obviously presenting challenges to the artists. I wondered if the making of forks out of salt was an insurmountable obstacle and so the absent diners have been called upon to make do with broad butter knives.

The Five Senses (2011) continues with the salt theme, where within ornate salt frames appear blank salt canvases suggesting that in this apocalyptic time, even the senses are under threat.

The other major series in the exhibition is drawn from Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nuclear Nations (2012-13). The main material here is uranium glass, which, if I understand it correctly, is basically glass to which uranium, probably in the form of oxide diuranate, is added to the glass paste, while still hot, for the sake of colour. The fluorescence is heightened under ultraviolet light to glow with a haunting green light, a dramatic effect undermined by anyone who has watched The Simpsons. The height of popularity for uranium glass was in the late 19th century and early 20th century and the glow for it faded during the Cold War, so that the whole medium in art has a slightly retro appearance.

Ken and Julia Yonetani's main concept behind the series is that each of these chandeliers, somewhat archaic in their structure, represents countries that have nuclear power plants and their size is dependent on the amount of power generated by these 31 countries. The biggest chandeliers belong to the US and France, the latter is exhibited in the main building of the National Gallery of Australia, while Ukraine and Russia are some of the smaller contributors. The Fukushima Daiichi disaster and the Chernobyl accident are consciously in the conceptual background to the work. There is an eerie glow in this installation and although we are told that the uranium glass is harmless and the radioactivity is negligible and can only be detected by the most sensitive Geiger counter, I felt curiously uncomfortable within this space.

The two angels did warn Lot, his daughters and his wife to leave Sodom and not to look back as the old ways were evil and incurred the wrath of God and were a path to destruction. Lot and his daughters did as they were told, but Edith, his wife, failed to obey and was turned to salt. The Yonetanis in their collaborative exhibition send us a similar eschatological message that unless we completely abandon our present ways, there will be dire consequences.