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Thursday, October 31, 2019

Alexandre Singh at Metro Pictures


(link)

An "imagined dystopic future." Says every press release today. Dystopia ripples through the artworld with the Gothic, occasionally hand in hand. Though Singh has been invested in Dystopia for some time - you may recall 2008's "Hello Meth lab in the Sun" - which now does feel very 2008 doesn't it. (Breaking Bad and antagonism to relational times.) This was then at the waning moments of the US's 8 years of George W. Bush. We were only hearing about Hope then. "Dystopia" spikes in Google Search Trends in 2005 (a video game released under the name) and, well, January 2016, correlating with another shifting US Presidential epoch. Why were we searching for Dystopias if we hand one on our hands? Why do horror themes correlate to each age's neurosis; Nuclear fears: Godzilla; Climate Change: environmental cataclysm films. Latest research on dreams says we perform in sleep to practice duress, invent the situation to imagine our performance. Our anxieties are given the fantasy of horror, dystopia, to watch and say, surely it won't be that bad, make them feel like fantasy.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s