Image Credit: Eva Papamargariti, still from ΒUT FOR NOW ALL I CAN PROMISE IS THAT THINGS WILL BECOME WEIRDER (2018) single-channel with audio

TRANSFER is pleased to announce an exhibition in collaboration with arebyte Gallery, London to launch their 2019 programme. Titled Home, the programme attempts to reflect upon notions of housing and redevelopment, the dislocation of marginalised bodies, new ecologies for future ways of living and the relinquishing of control of such futures back to nature.

Curated by Kelani Nichole of TRANSFER and featuring works by Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Snow Yunxue Fu, Carla Gannis, Claudia Hart, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Pussykrew, Sabrina Ratté, Amina Ross, and Alan Warburton RE-FIGURE-GROUND explores myth, identity, and the body. It proposes a softening – opening up an alternative view to the ideologies of Silicon Valley. Virtual space is inhabited with queer bodies; the boundaries of technology and the body are blurred, as are the lines between author, image, and algorithm. The artists unapologetically disrupt normative cultural production, demonstrating what it means to inhabit this infinitely malleable world.

We can no longer decipher what is real or fake. Simulation has been a topic of concerned conversation for decades, and in recent years, the contours of a new contemporary art movement have begun to emerge.

The ‘Simulism’ movement has developed in resistance to the ethos of Silicon Valley, the ‘platforming’ and globalisation of culture, and the widespread availability of technologies of power like artificial intelligence, photorealistic CGI, and virtual and augmented reality. Simulists simultaneously embrace and subvert technology, interrogating the slippery world in which we live, and proposing humanist and non-binary futures.

“The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based.” | Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real | Niels BOHR

In a 1977 lecture, Philip K. Dick spoke of counterfeit, deranged, private worlds where alternative experiences branch off and possible futures emerge, revealing the layers of simulation mediating contemporary culture. Simulacra and Simulation, a Jean Baudrillard treatise from the early 1980s, explored how signs, symbols, realities, and societies entwine into shared experiences—and how the saturation of such simulacra was beginning to render all meaning meaningless, long before we immersed ourselves in the overwhelming onslaught of digital stimulation we take for granted today. In her Cyborg Manifesto (1984) Donna Haraway explains the virtual camera emulates rules of the real world, but in a symbolic manner. The virtual camera symbolically embodies a liminal space, an interface that enhances our physical bodies with a prosthetic extension.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Morehshin Allahyari
She who Sees the Unknown, Aisha Qandisha (2018) Video Installation

LaTurbo Avedon
Afterlife (Beta) (2018) Single-channel with Audio

Snow Yunxue Fu
Karst (2018) VR and Single-channel Video

Carla Gannis
A Subject Self-Defined (2016) Single-channel Videos

Claudia Hart
The Flower Matrix (2017–ongoing) VR Installation

Lorna Mills
Yellowwhirlaway (2017) 4-channel Animated GIF installation

Eva Papamargariti
But for Now All I can Promise is Things will Become Weirder (2018) Video with Audio

Pussykrew
the bliss of metamorphing collapse (2018) VR and 3-channel Video Installation

Sabrina Ratté
Biomes (2016) Single-channel Videos with Audio

Amina Ross
by your hands i open/ spill out./ i’m the inside of an egg/ i pour/ we bloom/ magma rushing from a jagged crown of earth/ molten and dangerous and alive/ can’t you feel? (2018) Video Installation

Alan Warburton
Homo Economicus (2018) Single-channel Videos with Audio