Some exhibitions we would like to recommend/discuss include the new Ed Fornieles show at CARLOS/ISHIKAWA. This comes under the ‘recommend’ tab; it all looked very slick and the actual architecture of the space changed immensely, so that you were guided through it. It gets a little more creepy though because you know all those horrifying scenarios you see played out in dystopian sci-fi about social media? Well, Ed Fornieles is trying to make them a reality, and this ambitious little show is filled with complex and very worrying ideas. One work is a VR porn program where the body of your lover constantly shifts gender, race and shape. Enforced non-discriminatory sex, the politicisation of onanism: why have one partner when you can have all of them? In another piece, he allowed a team of ‘conversationalists’ to take over his Facebook account and conduct chats with friends. The data they compiled was used to build an artificial intelligence that could provide friendship services with no human input. He's also created a guide to building simulated worlds and a cute digital avatar whose moods are fed by global events.
Our favourite aspect of the work is its knowing nature; aware of its own cleverness and maybe even a bit smug, which makes it easy to dismiss. But he’s Patrick Bateman-esque in his sociopathic desire to push and push and push. He constantly nudges at the limits of our networked selves. And, importantly, he never neglects the aesthetics. The works accompanying the sim guide look like post-apocalyptic Jasper Johns paintings; the panels alongside the VR work look like kinky John Baldessaris. It’s interesting, and it looks good to boot. The whole show has the feel of a trade fair – as if it’s all stuff that could hit the market at any moment. It’s all a little too real.
The Ryder was another, slightly less exciting, exhibition we attended. It felt a little lazy in terms of curation since we had seen the same work at the degree show but it’s always fun to think about good artists getting good opportunities.
Cell Projects had a solo show by Mimosa Echard, which was OK but the frustrating thing was that central to the exhibition is this film called ‘The People’, which is compiled from the artist’s vast family archive of Mini DV footage all layered on top of each other. The layering meant that nothing was recognisable on the projection, leaving us with 120 minutes of abstraction in both sound and visuals.
Hannah Black’s exhibition at Chisenhale gallery titled ‘Some Context’ and is structured around 20,000 copies of ‘The Situation’, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about ‘the situation’. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation. The books provide the stuffing – in shredded form – for the ‘transitional objects’ also displayed in the space, and will be shredded at the end of the exhibition. It felt like a clever and thoughtful way to merge the personal and the political.
