Tolia Astakhishvili at Bonner Kunstverein

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Honestly just fun to scroll through. Its got that early Christoph Buchel en-abyme labyrinth without all the movie-set theater. Or Simon Fujiwara without the tradeshow pedagogy. It's replaced with a recursive shifting of scales. Models and images and cutouts make for a loss of footing in endless virtual passe-partout all existing concurrently in the digital, works incredibly well in digital images. The Synecdoche New York of exhibition space, deteriorating separations between imagery and reality. Architecture, white gallery space, the virtual plane, they have always only been metaphors for your skull.

artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or Christmas from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust. 

The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday... 

See too: Simon Fujiwara, The Model, Anna Zacharoff at Kantine, Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

“Rum, sodomy, and the lash” at Eden Eden

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The fritzing signals of today's art are haywire responses to the stimuli of the world's ever more erratic tone, and artists working to contain that nervous expression with their own affectual means discombobulated and freed from its semantic anchors as a coping mechanism for the staggering inanity of much of the world's power structures. Transgression of course becomes the last vestige of intimacy. Giving in to Melgaard's semantic video abuse in an otherwise thoughtful film guarantees some level of reciprocal investment from its viewers willing to allow it be inflicted upon themselves.

And now the old Sunday group-ex full circle en abyme, to haunt us. Our reflections symptomatic of the ruling parameters of its time, reflections of the entities that govern it, expressions of another hidden corporate body, expressions of the frightened and disdainful anti-socialite. The work in the exhibition feels pained in their reflection of the world. That as much as the ever disingenuous CAWD presents itself outside a system that it yearns for, CAWD getting its cake and eating it too.