New Scenario brings a new exhibition to their conceptual platform, titled Jurassic Paint and launching on June 11.
The New Scenario project was launched by Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig as a time-based platform for performative exhibition formats taking place “outside the realm of the white cube”, and the two founders team up to for the concept and curation of Jurassic Paint, described as having works on canvas and “live size (sic) dinos”.
we wanted to be better and ended up being happy, the name of a Fenêtre project-curated show that opened at Galerie Joseph Tang on March 27 (exhibition photos, top right), is now making its online migration in collaboration with OFluxo Blog. It is also a paradoxical statement that could drive you into an existential scream if you let it. Aren’t better people happier? Or is that ignorant people? Are they happier because they forgot it all? Are we sadder because we keep remembering?
The title, their press release writes, is an offhand statement in reply to the “promise of futurity in mainstream sci-fi culture in the 1980s and 1990s”. The future, they say, is a thing of the past; in contemporary culture, “presence has substituted promise, favouring a view of the future as an abridged temporal phenomenon”. We no longer have even nostalgia to cling to.
The group show, which features Felicia Atkinson, Dustin Cauchi, Pierre Clément, and Tilman Hornig,ran at Galerie Joseph Tang for one weekend in late March as part of the ongoing Fenêtre Project in collaboration with the Paris gallery, and is launching at its digital home for an online exhibition. The “curatorial / editorial / convening / creative practice”, developed by Mangion and Cauchi, deals with the dialectics of online/offline and the ways in which the two are converging in the contemporary art field.
Examining curation as an active, dynamic practice, they set up a landscape or “micro ecosystem” of signs and signals composed in hand-engraved text on various objects, like routers, silent speakers, laser pointers, and organic matter. “In this landscape,” they write, “the works co-habit the space harmoniously. This landscape however, harbours a system of signification that is not always visible, at times manifesting a disruption that destabilises this found harmony.” **
Installed in a Hummer limo but exhibited on the internet, the C R A S H group exhibition is the image of rupture. Or make that several images, as the show – curated by artists and New Scenario founders Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, along with Burkhard Beschow – presents a body horror of cybernetic objects and synthetic organisms sharing a place in fragments at a point of temporal rift.
Launched on January 17 and featuring the work of 11 artists, each image comes from the one luxury car interior but its object is viewed only in isolation at any given time. The empty space becomes animated as you select an artist’s name, like a point-and-click adventure game of grotesque hidden artefacts, from Hornig’s nylon-limbs stretched out across a leather couch to Barsch’s disembodied hairpiece, dreadlocked and dangling from the sunroof.
Tilman Hornig @ C R A S H (2015). Install view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.
Inspired by David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Chris Cunningham’s ‘Windowlicker‘ video for Aphex Twin there’s something chilling about Adam Cruces‘ baguette arm that wears three watches in the speaker compartment and Thomas Payne’s plastic pack of oversized synthetic slaters. It’s place in the driver’s cupholder implying it’s there to be eaten.
This is a backdrop of obscene wealth and mediated overstimulation, where the Hummer limousine comes already loaded with a contextual meaning that a white cube – whether online or off – consciously, but possibly even more artificially attempts to avoid. Thus these actors and their stage in the total cinematic experience of C R A S H, where the drama of Zack Davis‘ motionless glass barnacle stuck to the screen of a simulated fireplace plays out in a different dimension of the same space as Anne Fellner‘s painting of a white swan lying limply on its side.
Adam Cruces @ C R A S H (2015). Install view. Photo by Stefan Haehnel. Courtesy New Scenario.
An accompanying text by Joseph Hernandez called ‘Observations From the Bucket‘ presents a first-person account of a “coming change” ignored by the family but offering ideas and concepts that are “constant and shattered and reveled within”. The anatomical imagery that mostly travels through the protagonist’s digestive tract is slightly less confronting than d3signbur3au‘s troublingly feminised personification of a capitalism that’s eating itself in ‘for a future IV: but what if we are not alive?‘:
“Blue shit burning in her ass like melting solder… the smell of blue fever fills the air, a rotten metal meat smell that steams off her as she shits a soldering blue phosphorescent excrement”.
A bulbous pink blob, ice cubes expanding into polygonal shapes, a napkin spattered with what looks like blood and a toilet brush encrusted with grime and cigarette butts. All of these individual pieces add up to a production that evokes that same sensuous feeling of ‘venereal horror’ that made Cronenberg famous, J. G. Ballard an icon and our collective view to the future one that’s equal parts frightening and fascinating. **
