“Remembering the common source that binds us all…” writes artist Tore Wallert, in a press release text-poem introducing the Jurassic Haze exhibition, running at Berlin’s Center space, from December 19 to March 15. He’s one of seven contributors to the project that’s led by Antoine Renard and literally smeared with the creams and liquids that make up our contemporary experience, as envisioned through a “Dove lotion coating installation” that draws in a world of dirt and synthetics, augmented realities and screens of all sizes.
A suspended watermelon rotates at the centre of a shifting circle on a large LED screen in a corner as a monstrously distorted voice quotes an Apple Store description of a product that configures “an entire computer system on a single chip” in Renard’s ‘iWatch HD’ (2015). Pink and white walls are met with pink and white ceiling lights, while Wallert’s site-specific installation ‘Amanda’ (2015) hides in the bathroom. Fresh mint leaves and their stalks fill the sink and the floor, lying squashed and stepped on over white tiles daubed with blue ink and scattered with soda bottles. Dense and dirty imitation Dove body lotion containers made up of clear resin and sprinkled with “girlfriend dust” are perched next to low black metal benches, their milky body cream contents smudged across wall-length windows that someone’s signed with a finger. A diptych of digital prints by Renard and Sandra Vaka Olsen hang on a wall, the shattered screen picture fragments made up of lines of electricity that collide in shared tones and become form within their frames.
Camouflage-themed VR goggles hang by wires from the ceiling across from a matching jacket –dubbed ‘geek dress’ in its image file –with virtual views to Kate Sansom and Timur Si Qin‘s ‘Nissan Yoghurty’ (2015) rendering of a vast and empty gallery. There’s an eerie montage of violent home footage in Anthony Salvador‘s ‘DONTBRINGAKNIFE2AFISTFIGHT’ (2014) digital video, where you’re not just a viewer but an accomplice, while Grégoire Blunt and Emmy Skensved‘s (who recently completed eStamina) ‘center_H264_2000px_1500kbps_ACC’ (2015) presents a CGI room with a view. You can watch through the plant leaves that look like they’re weed, across to a simulation of water that swells to the icy beats and melodic computer-chimes of a corporatised environment that’s completely lost touch with what’s real. **
