Group Show ft. Patrick Quinn, Filippo Cegani, Paul Ferens, Javi Ramirez, Maggie Dunlap, Bora Akinciturk, Malte Zenses, Victor Seaward & Noelia Towers.
Grove, Battersea.02.06 - 08.07
The group exhibition "Bite the Hand" at Grove Collective delves into the enigmatic realm of duality and duplicity, showcasing artworks defined by inherent contradictions within the spaces we inhabit and ideologies we come to internalise. The complex array of entanglements ultimately faced is deconstructed with irony and sarcasm, devices which are employed by the artists in various approaches. The show takes a piercing aim at the systems and individuals that prop up and perpetuate established norms and power dynamics. The show is an exercise in pushing boundaries and seeking to unsettle accepted foundations, with a cynically subversive twist acknowledging how the art world operates and mimics such elements within society.
GROVE London
9B Battersea Sq., SW11 3RA, London, UK
The wide array of artists on show all deal with these conundrums is various fashions. Entering the space, the works of Patrick Quinn, Filippo Cegani, Paul Ferens and Javier Ramirez, are immediately confronting. The works riff off each other, an interplay of machismo questioning what contemporary masculinity means.
Maggie Dunlap's work epitomizes a humorously macabre questioning of the nature of knowledge. Authenticity is inextricably linked to authority, the slipstream between making them interchangeable notions. Her work, LA County Sheriff’s Press Pass, clearly doctored with her satirically morbid accreditation as PHOTOGRAPHER, highlighting the permeability of questions regarding what is legal, public, and private in the social media image-sharing age.
Blurring lines between authenticity and fabrication, as well as the potential for manipulation and deception, we are confronted with the ethical implications of information misrepresentation. The reflection is on the issues surrounding privacy, surveillance, and the dissemination of information in the online era. Discussion regarding the ways in which digital platforms and online communication challenge traditional notions of legality, public spaces, and personal boundaries.
The paintings of Bora Akinciturk are vehicles to test these ideas, the authority of images as they possess the ability to evoke emotion, shape narratives, and exert control over public discourse. His works play with the malleability of imagery in the digital age and in particular transgressive meme culture. He highlights the potential for subversion and resistance that memes hold, using them as tools to critique and question the dynamics of power and complicity.
His work, Çocuk Polis referring to a social phenomenon in Turkey where children are enlisted or encouraged to act as unofficial traffic police officers or monitors, is juxtaposed against Gezi Protest, highlighting insidious ways indoctrination and supplication to authority is fostered amongst the youth and potential circumventing of populist uprisings.
Born to Die utilizes a widely circulated and much-parodied copypasta, "BORN TO DIE / WORLD IS A FUCK / Kill Em All 1989 / I am trash man / 410,757,864,530 DEAD COPS". This meme’s complex layered references to the bloody Tiananmen Square protests, nihilistic fatalism and apathy, act viscerally in the sense that we cannot help but question how deprecation of the self and ironic detachment comes to be in the collective psyche; the real world consequences of totalitarianism becoming abstract to us.
Malte Zenses’ Campbell als Saturn builds upon the themes of detachment and violence, embodying a certain resignation prevalent in contemporary society, where loss of meaningful experiences or connections can arise from prioritizing convenience over engaging with the physical world. It raises questions about the effects of technology and the potential detachment from tangible experiences that can occur in our fast-paced, convenience-oriented culture. The mundane text overlayed on an image of Goya’s ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’, highlights the gore of consumption. The absurdity of post-capitalism and human apathy and capitulations in dealing with the material conditions and consequences of them is a literal critique of our choices leading us to the devouring our own future.
Victor Seaward's works add to this, as well as exploring the exhibition’s overarching theme of authenticity. In an age of technological advancements and artificial intelligence, his hyper-engineered facsimiles of transient objects go beyond mere depiction of traditional vanitas themes. His 3D-printed works highlight the tension between the present and the future; the decaying fruit, a pair of cigarettes and iron nails clustered neatly together in a corner, and other pieces of various reproductions of ephemera, exemplifying the dichotomy between humility and self-confidence. This challenges our perceptions and serves to provoke contemplation about our place in an increasingly technologically driven world.
Noelia Towers' paintings, sardonically titled after idioms, Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth and Look What the Cat Dragged In, offer up further explorations of the ideas of transience through their depictions of dead animals. The paintings allude to ideas of submission and pride, gifts and trophies, and how that correlates to value and worth in the face of symbols of authority.
“Bite the Hand" seeks to challenge and question contemporary established norms, inherent contradictions in culture, and the various insidious power dynamics found within society. There is a clear interlocution between the practices of the artists involved, their works playing off each other to undermine the preconceived ideas we hold about our own nature and how we relate to one another.
Playfully.
On until 08.07.2023