The Disappointed Tourist (installation at Turner Contemporary), Ellen Harvey, 2021. Photograph: Thierry Bal.
The Disappointed Tourist is an on-going project for which Ellen Harvey is making paintings of places nominated by members of the public in response to the question: “Is there some place that you would like to visit or revisit that no longer exists?”
Anyone can submit a site to be painted, although she does not guarantee that she will paint each site. All paintings are 24 x 18” (61 x 46 cm) and are painted to look like old hand-colored postcards in monochrome acrylic with oil glazes on wood panels and include the name of the site and the date of the site’s destruction.
To date, over 400 people from over 30 countries have taken part in the project and Harvey has completed over 300 paintings. While the largest category of submissions is of happy childhood memories, particularly of amusement parks, people have also used the project to call attention to the physical scars of conflict, racism, inequality, colonialism and climate change as well as to memorialize beloved events or places. The installation always includes unfinished paintings to signal that the project can never be complete. Each time that the project is shown, local outreach ensures that local lost sites are included. Contributors’ stories about their sites are collected on the Disappointed Tourist website.
After its preliminary outings in 2019 in Meadowarts‘ On Ruins at Whitley Court (UK) and The Suburban (Milwaukee, WI), this project traveled as the centerpiece of Harvey’s European retrospective to Turner Contemporary (UK, 2021), Museum der Moderne Salzburg (Austria, 2021), Laznia Contemporary Arts Center (Poland, 2023) and Butler Gallery (Ireland, 2023), A catalog for the retrospective, was produced by MdM Salzburg. The project was exhibited on its own at Rowan University Art Gallery & Museum (Glassboro, NJ, USA) last year. A small custom version was exhibited as part of The Dorset Pavilion (Venice) in 2024 and is currently on view in The Dorset Pavilion at Bridport Arts Centre (UK) until March 15.
The next exhibitions of The Disappointed Tourist will be at the Chicago Architecture Center in September and the University of South Florida Art Museum (Tampa, FL) in January 2026.
The exhibition at Turner Contemporary was selected by Frieze as one of the five best institutional shows in the UK in 2021. It has been the subject of considerable press, including in The New Yorker, WHYY and The Art Newspaper, among many others.
We live in a world that often feels as though it is vanishing before our eyes. Places we love disappear. Places we have hoped to visit cease to exist. The forces of war, time, ideology, greed and natural disaster are constantly remaking places that we love but cannot control or save. The Disappointed Tourist is inspired by the urge to repair what has been broken. It makes symbolic restitution, literally remaking lost sites, at the same time that it acknowledges the inadequacy of such restitution. It is inspired both by old postcards and by the tradition of tourist painting – both the paintings produced for wealthy tourists to take home and the touring paintings that allowed pre-photographic viewers to experience far-off places. It attempts to honor the trauma underlying the nostalgia that results from our collective and individual losses, while celebrating the human attachment to places both real and aspirational. It tries to create a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized and create a new conversation about our love for our physical environment, harnessing nostalgia to create empathy rather than division.
Ellen Harvey, 2021 New