Pauline Batista and Madeleine Stack presented two person exhibition Fatal Softness at London’s Koppel Project which ran November 16, 2017 to January 6, 2018.
The multimedia installation is interested in ‘what falls between the cracks,’ looking at the movement and flow of collapse and excavation and its relation to bodies, borders, patterns and “a shared language of opacity and incoherence.”
As you walk into the space, deep ambient drone sounds fill the space, emanating from large plastic domes hung from the ceiling. Moving into the main room, drenched in a deep red light, are a series of delicate sculptures like Batista’s ‘Genetic Jenga as a Zero-Sum Game’ made of perspex and hung together like a mobile through metal wire. Stack’s ‘LUTTE DE GLACE’ layers resin casts of cobblestones — torn up during Occupy Wall Street — into a decaying wall, and the column behind it, ‘Portable Monument,’ is covered in barely visible wax, dust and hair.
Among other photographic, 2D and sculptural works, the pair also collaborated on a video together titled ‘Fatal Softness,’ which looks at the relationship between intimacy and technology, asking “who decides what information is filtered, which memories are stored and how the circulation of bodies and ideas flows?”**