Like Mops on the Beach, 2016 (detail)
Like Mops on the Beach
Installation, Beauty, Textile, 68x71x106cm
Like Mops on the Beach explores the representation of graphic interfaces on social media and the role they play in framing interactions between the body and its digital extensions. The show turns the exhibition space into a post-apocalyptic beach, where the skeletons of abandoned digital devices lie in the aftermath of an underwater explosion caused by the collision between two nuclear submarines.
Like building debris on the shore framing the sunset in the distance after a tsunami, this set of modular sculptures acts as supporting structures for fragments of found online pictures labeled under the hashtag #sunsetporn. The work draws on the metaphorical potential of dusk and the creation of parallel online environments through communities of sharers. In the attempt to escape a hyper-accelerated present where capitalism is no longer interested in the workers’ body but rather in their time, groups of social media users try to find pleasure in digital dream-like spaces where the perception of time is stretched, as an instinctive form of resistance, that is not realised.
The exhibition title also alludes to Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach, which follows the experiences of an American nuclear submarine crew in Melbourne, Australia, as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war, a year previously. In parallel, today we seem to be helpless against a self-replicating present where we have lost any agency in the making of a comprehensive narration of reality, leaving us confused and uncertain in the waiting of a redemptive event that has been promised many times but never came.
Like building debris on the shore framing the sunset in the distance after a tsunami, this set of modular sculptures acts as supporting structures for fragments of found online pictures labeled under the hashtag #sunsetporn. The work draws on the metaphorical potential of dusk and the creation of parallel online environments through communities of sharers. In the attempt to escape a hyper-accelerated present where capitalism is no longer interested in the workers’ body but rather in their time, groups of social media users try to find pleasure in digital dream-like spaces where the perception of time is stretched, as an instinctive form of resistance, that is not realised.
The exhibition title also alludes to Nevil Shute’s 1957 post-apocalyptic novel On the Beach, which follows the experiences of an American nuclear submarine crew in Melbourne, Australia, as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war, a year previously. In parallel, today we seem to be helpless against a self-replicating present where we have lost any agency in the making of a comprehensive narration of reality, leaving us confused and uncertain in the waiting of a redemptive event that has been promised many times but never came.
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