Jesse Darling

there is a party @ DIY Space, Feb 16

15 February 2016

London’s DIY Space will host an event of readings titled there is a party on the evening of February 16.

Reading will be Jesse Darling, Rachel Benson, London-based Angela Shier who runs The Mall magazine, Christopher Kirubi, producer VÏSTAAurelia Guo –via iMessage if she’s awake, according to the FB Event page, and poet and video artist Steve Roggenbuck.

Roggenbuck is currently on tour and is also giving an artist’s tour at Goldsmiths on February 15.

See DIY Space event page for (limited) details**

Rachel Benson, Just Did It (2013) Courtesy the artist
Rachel Benson, ‘Just Did It’ (2013). Courtesy the artist.

 

 

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The Best British Poetry 2015 reviewed

13 January 2016

Emily Berry writes she struggled with the responsibility as the annual editor of The Best British Poetry 2015, beginning her introduction with a tentative “Hi, it’s quite scary to be the sole editor of an anthology.” It’s an admission that feels distinctly gendered in its hurried disclosure. I felt it beginning this review, knowing no other way to acknowledge my own felt inadequacy as poetry critic than to deflect. The only honest critics, I am starting to believe, are the ones that know how to tell a story.

“On the one hand…who am I,” Berry writes, “to be deciding, on my own, what is ‘best’ (not to mention ‘British’)?” The question barely has time to register before she follows it with: “On the other hand I thought I was exactly the person to be deciding it. I mean, we all think that whatever we like is the best, right?” To be sure, what has made its way into the book is not the best of Britain in any way that is quantifiable or conclusive in its execution, but rather the best of Berry’s research, which proves to be quite enough.

The Best British Poetry, ed. Emily Berry. Courtesy Salt Publishing.
The Best British Poetry, ed. Emily Berry. Courtesy Salt Publishing.

In my mind where what I like is the best her results are extraordinary —a 70-plus collection of writings that manages to feel both timeless and patently of this time. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the first five poems of the anthology are written by women, and that the gender breakdown of the anthology itself veers distinctly towards the feminine. That’s not to say that it is a “feminist” anthology, or one of “female writers” —it seems simply that given the opportunity to select content based on one’s intuition, as Berry did, one always chooses that which elicits a personal response. And what could be more personal, I suppose, than one’s gender and its tenuous existence in the strata of society.

Aria Aber opens the anthology brilliantly with ‘First Generation Immigrant Child’, tossing her freedom and religion at each other like firecrackers—her “sucking and studying / another girl’s body, my mind a knot of tinkling beads / tangled inside a stranger’s unwashed hands,” then her headscarf in a mosque, her cousin whispering “Blood is thicker than water, / even for whores, her breath a verve of Darjeeling and Marlboro / Lights.” Astrid Alben’s ‘One of the Guys’ follows like the continuance of one long, interrupted thought (“not too much poetry / should be done by too many girls. You see, or elthe!”), taken up by Rachael Allen like a baton in a relay race with the poem ‘Prawns of Joe’ and this single, devastating opening sentence: “When I had a husband I found it hard to breathe.”

The Best British Poetry, ed. Emily Berry. Courtesy Salt Publishing.
The Best British Poetry, ed. Emily Berry. Courtesy Salt Publishing.

It’s not all women, certainly, nor is it all ‘women’s issues’ (though only the witless —of which there are so many!—would use that term). But the collection has a particular feeling, which, while basic enough once articulated, remains almost absurdly elusive: it seems to hold the experiences and idiosyncrasies of one sex in equal regard to the other, presenting each as nothing more or less than the experiences of a single person responding to the world around them.

One such experience, and my favourite piece in the anthology, is Paula Cunnigham’s ‘A History of Snow’, told in a broken dialect reminiscent of writers like Flannery O’Connor and the characters of antebellum. “It was a wild sudden,” it begins, following a young girl as she falls severely ill and is saved, in a moment of almost banal kindness, by a stranger at the hospital.

There are too many good pieces to enumerate –including pieces by Sophie Collins, Daisy LaFarge, Sarah BoultonJesse Darling and besides: often it is the lines, not the works, that stay with you. There’s “…and I am running out of places to hide…” from Janette Ayachi’s ‘On Keeping a Wolf’; “another part which I can only describe as / the distance between distance / and distance” from Crispin Best’s ‘poem in which i mention at the last moment an orrery’. Then there’s basically every existing line from Kit Buchan’s ‘The Man Whom I Bitterly Hate’ and from Niall Campbell’s ‘Midnight’, which begins with the discovery that “all because I’d held my child, / oh heart, and found that age was in my cup now” and ends with this single indisputable truth: “no heart grown heavy, heavier, with caring”. **

The Best British Poetry 2015, edited by Emily Berry, was published by Salt Publishing in September, 2015.

Header image: The Best British Poetry, ed. Emily Berry. Courtesy Salt Publishing.

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Call for submissions @ HOAX, Jan 6

4 January 2016

HOAX is now accepting submissions for issue #7 until January 6.

HOAX publication is non-profit project dedicated to gathering, printing and publishing artworks that incorporate text in a small pastel-coloured pamphlet, every six months. Editor of HOAX and writer, Lulu Nunn has worked with the printed editions as well as HOAX’s website as an online exhibition platform to dissolve the distinction between the practices of writing and art making.

Previous contributors have included: Sara Stutterlin, Iain Morrison, Jesse Darling – who made a Christmas video for the website, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and Daisy La Farge.

Submissions are especially welcome from women, people of colour, LGBTQIA, disabled people and all underrepresented minorities.

See the the HOAX website for details and guidelines and the twitter account, QUOAX for inspiration.**

Jesse Darling + Takeshi Shiomitsu, Same Same (2014) @ CAC41N:41E install view. 'Flag'. Courtesy the artists.
Jesse Darling + Takeshi Shiomitsu, Same Same (2014) @ CAC41N:41E install view. ‘Flag’. Courtesy the artists.
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Ruptures… @ Association of British Insurers, Dec 12

7 December 2015

The Ruptures; Between the City and the Art World artist conference is taking place at London’s Association of British Insurers on December 12.

As the first instalment in the Ruptures “critical nomadic platform”, the event applies to the series remit of being held in “expected and unexpected” spaces with this one being “The Boardroom” of the ABI building and exploring the “contamination of the corporate” in art.

The conference is conceived “in partnership” with Jesse Darling, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, JK_NET, Paul Maheke, Raju Rage and Takeshi Shiomitsu, and aims to explore the “implications of engaging with the boardroom as an art space”. It also includes a screening of Coco Fusco’s ‘Operation Atropos’ (2006) and a Skype appearance from Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men, all of will be live-streamed on the day by thisistomorrow

 See the event page for details.**

INVITATION RUPTURES

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Nothing @ Unna Way, Dec 5 – 11

5 December 2015

The Nothing group show is on at Huddersfield’s Unna Way, opening December 5 and running to December 11.

The exhibition will be the third for the gallery since their inaugural Its Our Party and We’ll Cry If We Want To, Cry If We Want to, examining art openings as places and times of partying “through our own cruel attachments towards artistic institutional rituals”.

Participating artists in Nothing include Jesse Darling x Takeshi Shiomitsu, Puy SodenHannah Regel, Sarah Boulton, and Rose Goddard among others and explores the comfort we seek and how it might slip through our fingers:

“Do you feel the pull of soft comfort in the folds of those materials that offer optimistic value, that promise that this time it will be just right? What do we labour towards when the potential is often more affective than the completed form…?”

See the Unnaway website for details. **

Tenderhooks, Hannah Regal 2013

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Banner Repeater fundraiser party @ L’Entrepot, Dec 4

4 December 2015

Banner Repeater is hosting a fundraising lottery prize-pulling party at London’s L’Entrepot on December 4.

The lottery has been runs online here and here and at the train platform itself until December 4 and is being used to help fund some of the art space’s costs, including rent and running costs, new artworks, publications and commissions, on-going reading groups, and development of the Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing: BookBlast.

The lottery tickets (priced at £5 each, while a membership of £30 comes with 7 free tickets) bring a chance to win various prints, publications and items from the Banner Repeater portfolio, including works by Hannah Sawtell, Jesse Darling, and Erica Scourti.

See the Banner Repeater website for details. **

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Episode 4: Bathroom @ Oslo10, Nov 24

24 November 2015

Dynamic and performative time-based exhibition platform New Scenario and “post-gender avatar” Agatha Valkyrie Ice are presenting the Episode 4: Bathroom installation at Münchenstein, Switzerland’s Oslo10 on November 24.

The event features artists Mikkel Carl, Jesse Darling, Michele Gabriele and Sandra Vaka Olsen, and appears as part of the Body Holes project Chapter 7: ANUS, along with a screening by Daniel Iinatti.

Episode 4: Bathroom comes with little additional information aside from a text with its focus on the digestive tract, including an excerpt that goes as follows:

“…Ai is closely related to the mouth and hand, which are also organs strongly controlled by the sexopolitical campaign against masturbation and homosexuality in the nineteenth century. The anus has no gender.”

See the Oslo10 website for details.**

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Jesse Darling + Juliet Jacques @ Carroll / Fletcher, Nov 11

10 November 2015

Author Juliet Jacques and artist Jesse Darling discuss digital spaces and trans* identities at a sold-out event at Carroll / Fletcher on November 11.

The event is part of a special season-long series collaboration titled Networked Culture, Digital Politics between Carroll / Fletcher and Verso Books which examines the relationship between culture and digital technology.

Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir published by Verso this year, joins artist and writer Darling to discuss feminist thought, queer theory, non-binary and trans-identities and “their articulation in online spaces”, as well as the general artistic practices and explore both body and technology.

See the event page for details. **

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Jesse Darling @ Serpentine Galleries reviewed

8 October 2015

NTGNE is a retelling of, Antigone, the hellenic fable whose eponymous heroine has been an enduring symbol of anti-imperial struggle for centuries. Like Sophocles’ original work which was written at a time of great national fervor, Jesse Darling’s performance is presented in London on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, a day of mass mourning and a sobre reminder of the greatest ideological attack on the Western Imperial project in modern times.

After jostling for space in the crowded Serpentine Pavilion, I find myself lying flat on a yoga mat in complete darkness, contorted amongst the multitude of bodies that have piled inside. As the performance begins, a discordant throb of electrical interference pulses through the air, vibrating the opalescent skin of the stage set. The atmosphere is ominous and psychedelic, like a bad trip, and my discomfort is intensified by a foreboding meta-commentary between bursts of white noise; “…the floor feels really hard on your head”, I am told by a young voice as I fidget, “you feel vulnerable…you’re forced to”. I am now hyper aware of my body and its encroachment into shared space. As audience members settle around each other, a chorus erupts, holding a dissonant harmony until their voices waver, breath running out, reminding us of our corporeality and the frailty of a collective voice.

Jesse Darling, NTGNE (2015). Courtesy Serpentine Galleries.
Jesse Darling, NTGNE (2015). Courtesy Serpentine Galleries.

A News jingle chimes over the PA; a reporter from ISMN (“International, State and Municipal Newswire” – whose initials are extrapolated from the name of Ismene, Antigone’s sister) who we are told is our “only legitimate truth source”, warns us of an epidemic with an unknown source that is sending the city’s residents into “mass hysteria”. The virus, NTGNE (an acronym for National Terror Grief Negation Epidemic), threatens to engulf the entirety of the “pale kingdom” of King Carry-On (whose name is a pun the original King Creon in Sophocles’ version, among other things). The allusions to 9/11 and the fall of Empire are recurrent, and the staging of the performance on a day of commemoration gives a sinister tone to the unfolding news reports that pace the production. The cast –with writer Penny Goring, actor Shia Labeouf and Darling’s own dad among them burst into life, writhing and crawling, zombie-like, through the unsuspecting crowd having previously hidden in plain sight. An orgiastic struggle ensues and members of the audience are dragged to their fate as the performance reaches its climax. A silence descends, the crowd is left in a state of panic. Abruptly, we are told to “Leave the auditorium immediately”, to which we duly oblige, fleeing the scene of the imaginary contagion with considerable urgency.

Left to right: Shia LeBeouf, Taylor LeMelle, Habibi Goring, Luke Turner, Jesse Darling, Penny Goring. The making of NTGNE.
Jesse Darling, (The making of) NTGNE. Left to right: Shia LeBeouf, Taylor LeMelle, Habibi Goring, Luke Turner, Jesse Darling, Penny Goring. Courtesy the artist.

Darling’s NTGNE is a somber reflection on powerlessness and subjugation, a complex deconstruction of neo-liberal subjectivity and Empire. Indeed, the etymology of the name ‘Antigone’, meaning “worthy of one’s parents”, elucidates a complex narrative of hierarchy and inheritance, and it is the legacy of these inherited ideologies that Darling is most interested, not least through the involvement of their own family as cast members. NTGNE tells us that to mourn the conditions of late capitalism is to mourn our collective agency, but that to deviate is to die. Upon taking our leave, we are given passenger jet-shaped cookies, fuselage aflame and wrapped carefully in cellophane; a saccharine end to a bitter morality tale. **

Jesse Darling’s NTGNE performance was on at London’s Serpentine Galleries, September 11, 2015.

Header image: Jesse Darling, NTGNE (2015). Courtesy Serpentine Galleries.

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Low Impact: ‘Quick Dense Forest’ launch @ P1 Studios, Sep 4

4 September 2015

Low Impact launches its third issue, ‘Quick Dense Forest’, at London’s P1 Studios today, September 4.

‘Quick Dense Forest’ comes on the heel’s of Low Impact‘s second issue, ‘Shallow Waters’, which we recently reviewed, and their inaugural issue, ‘Transparententities’. The independent, artist-run publication was created by Sarah Boulton, Valinia Svoronu, Eiko Soga and Sarai Kirshner.

For their third issue, the publication will be featuring works by 16 artists including Jesse Darling, Ira ShalitUlijona OdišarijaJammie NicholasVera Karlsson, Margarita Athanasiou and Melanie Counsell.

See the FB event page for details. **

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Devotions (2015) @ MOT exhibition photos

17 August 2015

Co-curated by Takeshi Shiomitsu and Tom Clark, Devotions articulates its title using the physical edges and borders of materiality to express the ambiguity of the present. The exhibition ran at London’s MOT International Project Space from March 26 to May 9 (photos, top right) and featured the work of artists Jesse Darling, Imran PerrettaMilou van der Maaden and Shiomitsu himself.

It attempts to take “the material of identity – where materials become identity – as a place from which to run”. The press release further states, “devotion exists, and does so, and must do, without empirical knowledge. Being devoted here (in the West) means embodying pushes and pulls between your irrational self and the rational world”.

Milou van der Maaden, From a Head to a Head (2011) Install view. Courtesy MOT International, London.
Milou van der Maaden, ‘From a Head to a Head’ (2011) Install view. Courtesy MOT International, London.

Darling’s ‘Wounded Door’ (2014), an abstract rectangular sculpture made of welded mild steel with a cast iron wheel, appears to be in search of definition as the corners and edges demarcate where the position begins and ends in the physical space. Alongside ‘The Veterans’ (2014), their sculptures maintain a sense of strictness, with hard corners and angles that almost imply stability in their position, whether physical or theoretical. However, the fragile and vulnerable design contradicts itself: it seems as if they could tip over from the slightest poke or breeze.

A pencil drawing on archival paper, gesso, emulsion, and spray paint made up Shiomitsu’s ‘Untitled (Range #2)’ (2015), which also seems to “push and pull” between its position, the material’s irrational self expressed with marks and scratches against the rationale inherent in the support and material – rectangular MDF and plywood boards. Perretta’s ‘5 percent’ (2015) HD video loops next to sandalwood incense in a pickle jar, typically used as a votive or gesture of devotion. van der Maaden’s ‘From a Head to a Head (clip)’ (2011) uses HD video documentation of a ritualistic ceremony of non-western tradition that jerks at the ambiguousness of the other artists’ works, positioning itself within well-defined tradition and history.

A text by Tom Clark published to vqxz.net accompanied the exhibition. **

Devotions was on at London’s MOT International, running March 26 to May 9, 2015.

Header: Imran Perretta, ‘5 Percent’ (2015) Install view. Courtesy MOT International, London.

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The Fifth Artist @ Wysing Arts Centre, May 23 – Jul 5

20 May 2015

Wysing Arts Centre launches their latest group exhibition, The Fifth Artist, opening at their Cambridge location on May 23 and running until July 5.

The exhibition brings new works by four artists that had participated in live-in farmhouse residencies during the winter of 2014 at Wysing Arts Centre, residencies that were themed The Future and haunted by the spectral presence of The Fifth Artist. These artists are Olivier Castel, Jesse Darling, Julia Crabtree & William Evans, and Alice Theobald.

A recounted ghost story, they write, created a slippage between fiction and reality, a “part-believed, part-ridiculed ripple” that cast a shadow over not only their time at the Cambridge farmhouse but their post-residency work as well.

See the exhibition page for details. **

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TIFKAS @ Arcadia Missa, Mar 5 – Apr 4

4 March 2015

Artists Hannah Quinlan Anderson and Rosie Hastings come to Arcadia Missa for their first joint solo exhibition, titled TIFKAS and running from  March 5 to April 4.

The exhibition is envisioned as a re-materialisation of the idea of a gay bar as a politically queer space, an idea that stemmed from and with their joint 2014 project @Gaybar. Much like their project, the show envisages “a fantasy gay bar through reimagining queer iconography, history and writing that spans geological, political and temporal locations”.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a book titled after the @Gaybar project, with contributions from Caspar Heinemann, Jesse Darling, Hannah Black and Kate Tempest, and excerpts from the incredible part-memoirs of Leslie Feinberg in Stone Butch Blues.

See the artists’ joint website for details. **

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An interview with Natalia Sielewicz

18 February 2015

“I love internet cafes,” says Natalia Sielewicz through a chuckle, “I have an unhealthy fascination with them”. The curator is in a coffee shop next to a converted furniture sales department store of PRL Poland, that is now, temporarily, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw where she works. She’s just closed a huge four month programme of exhibitions, performances and talks by artists from around the world called Private Settings, Art After the Internet and if you’re familiar with the art, or just the miscellaneous cities that that art comes from, you’d certainly understand her enthusiasm for the public-private space of the online interface.

It’s an exhibition that features work by artists often labelled as, but not necessarily personally identifying with, an art movement known as ‘post-internet’. There are all the key touchstones, from Ryan Trecartin, Ed Atkins and DIS, to Takeshi MurataMetahaven and Jon Rafman, as well as some  lesser-known but no less interesting artists include Bunny Rogers, Darja Bajagić, and Nicolas Ceccaldi. Pamela Rosenkranz‘s Fiji water bottle and spandex canvases are stretched out on one wall of the MoMAW atrium, while Korakrit Arunandonanchai‘s Levi’s jeans body paintings are hanging on the other. Harm van den Dorpel‘s MoMAW building selfie is winding itself into an endless sphere, hanging from the ceiling between them.

Pamela Rosenkranz, 'Untouched by the Air of the 21. Century (My Colour Hurts)' (2014) @ Private Settings. Installation view. Courtesy MoMAW.
Pamela Rosenkranz, ‘Untouched by the Air of the 21. Century (My Colour Hurts)’ (2014) @ Private Settings, Art After the Internet. Installation view. Courtesy MoMAW.

You might note that those artists mentioned above are based along the faultline of a ‘global’ network that’s still centered around the traditional economic centres of the US, UK and western Europe. But there’s also the ‘Live Distillation’ (2013) single-channel video-installation from South Africa’s CUSS Group, work by Saudi Arabia’s Sarah Abu Abdallah and a response to Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Blue by Poland’s Gregor Różański. There are a few artists you’d expect to be included that aren’t and even a couple that you wouldn’t that are.

That’s because the conversation going on around Private Settings is more interesting than age groups and vaguely shared aesthetics. With less of the corporate and none of the speculative, the focus of the exhibition is set squarely on interrogating subjectivity and its interaction with the contemporary consumer-focussed, hyper-capitalist milieu of the internet, by extension questioning what exactly ‘post-internet’ as a branded catch-all really represents. That is, post-internet as a contemporary condition that doesn’t just affect those living where the major markets are, while recognising its influence as a hegemonic spread: “Maybe it’s even more honest to speak from this western-centric perspective because we’re not colonising other countries with this hot word in a very ideologically-charged way that’s both socially and geographically placed.”

You mentioned that when curating the show there was less of a focus on the aesthetics associated with this particular generation of artists and more on identity and the body.

Natalia Sielewicz: I started by looking at Private Settings as a space of intimacy, of performing your identity, not only online; also of how there’s this constant feedback between your online space and offline space interacting with each other. I thought that maybe we could define that precisely as ‘private settings’ and ask whether this is specifically domestic space, is it feminised space? Or is it basically a space where all these issues collide with each other?

And an important thing to me was also, not really thinking about ‘private settings’ as privacy settings, all the issues around surveillance and manipulation. Of course, that is also part of the show but what I found more intriguing was how the ‘black mirror’ of your iPhone or your laptop can give an illusion of intimacy, even though we’re constantly performing in a very narcissistic, exhibitionistic way among our peers and on social media.

I think we have to come to a new conclusion on how to define this condition that we live in and how to apply it to different groups of artists, and different media, without sounding crass and without pissing anyone off. Because even some artists who are in the show wouldn’t want be branded as ‘post-internet’, where as maybe there would be a need for some of the Polish artists to be part of the bandwagon. Or maybe not. It’s treacherous ground [laughs].

There’s often a misconception that because something is presented online, that it has some kind of broadened reach. But the internet, and social media specifically, is so personalised, dispersion is so specific. You can post something and assume that everyone will see it, but everyone won’t.

NS: Well, going back to this thread of colonisation, regional colonisation and also social colonisation, after 1989 many former eastern European countries tried to abolish the label of being ‘eastern’, with or without much success. But for at least 10 years the market, the galleries, the institutional shows, everywhere in Europe would really help to colonise eastern European arts of the 90s, or of the early 2000s. The same artists would reappear and it would be something that the later generations would also have to fight against. So maybe it’s just the natural order, but that brings me to this whole conversation about, say, African post-internet art. I’m sure that it would create a scene that will be perceived as, you know, the Nigerian ‘post-internet scene’ of 2015, 2018 [laughs] and maybe that will evolve into something else…

But it’s still a label that’s originated in the west so maybe you’re right in suggesting that it should potentially stay western-centric…

NS: Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about this. There’s such richness in art-making everywhere and there’s such a richness in the internet that’s not western-specific. Maybe we should just let region-specific art flourish without branding it immediately with our Western stamp of evaluation.

I also have a problem with white hegemonic institutions doing there documentA-style research… putting it in neat boxes and categories and high-fiving itself. There is of course the educational potential of that, as long as we allow the subaltern voices to be truly heard, clear and loud.

One of the things that blows my mind, it how impressive Polish graphic design was in the 60s and 70s and how bad it is now. It seems like an extreme reaction to anything that looks vaguely Soviet.

NS: Partially, yeah, that’s a part of it. We have this term that’s called ‘typo polo’…

Typo Polo (2014) curated by Rene Wawrzkiewicz. Exhibition view. Courtesy MoMAW.
Typo Polo (2014) curated by Rene Wawrzkiewicz. Exhibition view. Courtesy MoMAW.

Like disco polo?

NS: It reflects the terrible aesthetic of early capitalism from the 90s, where it was basically like GeoCities but in the public sphere. People started opening their own enterprises and small businesses, and when you’d drive on the ‘Route 66’ in Poland you’d see all of these really horrible advertising billboards, with really horrible typography. They’d have company names that stand for a thirst for one’s own first business, or their first million, so anything with a suffix ‘-ex’ or ‘pol’. Like, ‘Natalex’, for Natalia, or ‘Glaspol’; anything that would connote western glamour and success ‘incorporated’, whatever service you’re offering and wherever this service is originating from.

This is actually now fetishised in Poland. You have DJ collectives that play on this trope, what we call the ‘kwejk aesthetic’. Kwejk is a website that’s like 4chan or something but rooted in a Polish aesthetic and Polish domains. It’s really crass and disgusting, quite funny but in a very crude way, and it’s embracing this identity that was really pushed under the carpet for many, many years by intellectual and social elites.

It’s quite interesting how, with modernisation, you have to work with these tensions between your aspirations and retaining your identity, even questioning whether there is such a thing as a core identity of a nation state or a nationality.

That reminds me of those pierogi restaurant chains here, Zapiecek, where the wait staff wear those generic folk outfits…

NS: Well, that’s catered to tourists, right? That happens everywhere. I’m talking about something more ‘street’ and something more rooted in everyday vernacular, of kebabs that are falling apart and underground kiosks near the central railway station…

We had this show at the Museum, which was actually called Typo Polo, and featured graphic design of the 90s from old public services and private businesses and there’s an amazing energy in this abundance and excess. I think it’s really interesting to think about in terms of excess. Because, perversely, and speaking of post-internet, I don’t think it’s dealing with excess, I think it’s trying to contain things and feelings to an object.

It’s interesting to think of ‘typo polo’ as this kind of contemporary folk art. I heard that there’s a similar thing going on with immigrant communities running small businesses in places like Berlin, that this internet café and kebab shop aesthetic is actually tied to identity.

NS: I think that’s what CUSS from South Africa is doing too. It’s a totally different aesthetic but they do in situ projects in internet cafés and I think it’s part of this aestheticisation, or a certain genre of the internet cafe as this transitory place. It’s also sad because here you can’t find them any more.

Speaking of London, it’s like this really clandestine public space, where you’re with other people sending money through Western Union, expats are looking for flats and families from the Middle East are on Skype because they can’t set up a direct debit so they can’t have a BT or Virgin Mobile broadband connection…

But to give you an example of the Polish ‘typo polo’ corporate aesthetic present in, let’s say, Polish post-internet art that I think is happening, is that instead of Red Bull of Fiji water, artists would use Monster Energy drink, or these Polish slippers from the 90s called Kubota [laughs].

I felt like this Private Settings exhibition was a good bookend to thinking about post-internet for 2014, or a significant point of transition at least. The label has already been absorbed as a fashion, there are artists making a lot of money and the brand has been reabsorbed into corporate advertising, even as it has just recently been appropriated from it. But I think the exhibition represents a certain maturity of the themes being explored across its artists.

NS: Well, I wonder if in general that might be a certain perception of post internet as this immature hedonistic youth culture of the present… Of course, I am critical of the show as well, but one thing I really didn’t want to do was replicate the aesthetic, to the point that at one moment I was like, ‘oh my god, this is not looking like post-internet art’ [laughs]. **

Select arrow top-right for exhibition photos.

Private Settings, Art after the Internet group exhibition, curated by Natalia Sielewicz was on at Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, running September 25 to January 4, 2015.

Header image: Korakrit Arunandonchai @ Private Settings, Art After the Internet (2014). Courtesy MoMAW.

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Tiril Hasselknippe @ Evelyn Yard, Dec 17 – Jan 23

16 December 2014

London’s Evelyn Yard wraps up the year with a new exhibition by Tiril Hasselknippe titled Sophanes and running from December 17 to January 23.

The opening brings a performance work by artist Jesse Darling  and reading by Harry Burke, the editor behind I Love Roses anthology and the author of the newly released book, City of God, which we will be reviewing shortly.

As far as a description of either the exhibition itself or the opening’s performance and reading, Evelyn Yard only offers a string of cliché phrases and random-seeming words that has become something of a staple with London galleries.

“Tug of war.” “Into the abyss.” “So stark. You scamp.” They don’t reveal much, but the show’s single released image shows sand gradients and the echoes of an ‘organic’ installations that seem in line with some of Tiril’s previous work.

See the FB event page for details. **

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