Kandor was a city on the planet Krypton, prior to the planet's destruction. It was shrunk and stolen by Superman’s second-deadliest archenemy (after Lex Luthor), Brainiac. Artist Mike Kelley initiated the Kandors series in 1999. He has actualised over 100 sculptural materializations based on the idea of Kandor. Past representations of it are typified by a past style of imagining a futuristic city, a style that drew upon an specific past - the Art Deco design of the 1920s and 1930s.

Superman recovered and preserved the city in his Fortress of Solitude, a place of solace for Superman far away from civilization (usually the arctic). However events during the 2004-2005 comic book story arc (Superman #204-215) lead to the self-destruction of the Fortress. In 2011 Kelley exhibited some fragments of it at Gagosian Gallery in Britannia Street in London, including boulders and slabs of rock forming a cave, inside of which one discovered the miniature Kandor - ‘a glowing rose-colored city in a bottle’.

The ongoing motif of Kandor in the Kelley’s work serves as the spark of inspiration for this new expression of powerlessness via a gesture with exhibitionary intent; the placement of a piece of ‘kryptonite' (a green crystalline material originating from Superman’s home world of Krypton that emits a peculiar radiation that weakens Superman) at the Britannia Street gallery entrance, as a memorial to the destroyed Fortress.