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DAVID BURROWS

There is no painting or sculpture in outer space, Gysin was right.

- DAVID BURROWS (2014)
For a number of years and up to the present moment, David Burrows has attempted to fathom what he has named as ‘black hole ontology’ – an idea about what can be said to exist or a notion of being from the perspective of a sentient black hole that was produced when the Hadron Collider was switched on in Switzerland in 2010 in CERN.

Blind Date Singularity

Helsinki Contemporary (2018)

This black hole – which is neither black nor a hole – was not produced by scientists exactly, but by the Celtic god Cernunnos, the god of the forests, as a prank and to confront a human subject that has believed itself a privileged agent of reality, with the reality of being as non-appearance.
Further encounters with, and communications from the sentient black hole are recorded and translated through artworks that venerate the black hole as a being that can consume spacetime, that can hold everyday language and media in a red-shifting event horizon, and that sucks the light from enlightenment culture to reveal its dark shadow forms.

Black Hole Total Body Workout Flex (2024)

Acrylic on digital print on dibond
80 x 60 cm

Black Hole Yeezy Foam Adidas Vermillion (2024)

Acrylic on digital print on dibond
80 x 60 cm

The black hole appeared to Burrows in a half-dream in 2011 and the first thing the singularity communicated was that in outer space ‘there is no painting or sculpture, Gysin was right’.

Black Hole Ontology (2023)

Video still

Singularities are not metaphors but agents pointing not to god, or the death of god even, but another cosmology entirely in which many gods – invisible and all consuming – collapse spacetime and pour forth from the resulting breach.

Have you ever seen an atom?

Summerhall, Edinburgh

Have you ever seen an atom?

Summerhall, Edinburgh

[...] fiction is a term that has increasing valence in wider political cultures, as indicated especially in the new terminology used to describe contemporary political reality: ‘post-fact’ and ‘post-truth’. Reality is itself an increasingly relative term on this terrain, with ideas of perception management replacing any idea of truth.

- DAVID BURROWS & SIMON O'SULLIVAN
FICTIONING (2019)
Fictioning the Myth Functions of contemporary art and philosophy by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan
Burrows has no doubt that there is a reality – a real that pushes back and says no – but this reality, particularly when it is described as a social reality, is approached and grasped and produced through fictioning. This concept is analysed and developed by Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan in the book Fictioning: the Myth Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2019. Book details

A Person Throwing a Stone (2023)

Paper collage, acrylic and printed text

Burrows likes doing paperwork, and making small gestures, about the little or sharp edges of meaning, off things hard to forget, of histories and events that are difficult, and those that seem significant and absurd.

Auto-Normative Break-Up (2010)

Paper

Paper Cut-Ups (2012)

Paper and acrylic paint

Freedom Through Repetition (2012)

Paper and acrylic paint

From 2010, Burrows made artworks as a form of cybernetic, sigil-making, and films and gifs exploring cybernetic ideas and fictions.

Cyber Spell Loops (2017)

Paper and card

Cyber Spell Loops (2017)

Paper and card

The artist knows that what the frog’s eyes tell the frog’s brain is not everything the frog sees, and Burrows suspected that this was the case with most people’s eyes, including the artist’s own.

Pc V Mac (2017)

Film

In the 2000’s Burrows made a number of aftermaths. At the time, Burrows was interested in what was chaos or chance and what was order or structure, particularly thinking about how mass media images and everyday scenes seem to be based on modern and avant-garde artworks, with their principles of destruction and renewal.

Attack of the Revolutionary Army of Infant Jesus

Cell Project Space, London (2001)

Fire is to Red as Blood is to Orange

Photographs

Modern Spirit is Firmness & Fine Lines (2008)

Paper

New Life (2001)

Mead Gallery, Warwick

In 2004, Burrows presented an Arts Council England funded touring show New Life at Chisenhale Gallery London, Collective Gallery Edinburgh, Mead Gallery Warwick and Aspex Gallery Plymouth, presenting a window display style presentation of Window Display Disaster Scene, 2004. Just before this, Burrows was selected for the exhibition Micro/Macro: British Art 1996-2002, group show curated by the British Council, Mucsanok/ Kunsthalle Budapest; collaborated with DJ Simpson to Sample Scatter Synthesis (Amplified), Artspace Sydney as part of their residency in Australia in 2002; was selected for Becks Futures at the ICA London, Fruitmarket Edinburgh and Sothebys New York; and received a Paul Hamlyn Artist’s Award in 2001.

Diagrams are stories that tell stories.

- DAVID BURROWS

Diagram of a Scene

Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2015)

With Dean Kenning, John Cussans, Ami Clarke, David Osbalderson and Andy Conio, Burrows formed the group Diagram Research, Users & Generation Group (DRUGG) and held symposiums and curated an exhibition The Plague of Diagrams at the ICA.

More recently Burrows formed the Social Morphologies Research Unit with Dean Kenning, Hermoine Spriggs, Martin Holbraad, John Cussans, and the Diagram Research Group with Kenning, Cussans and Mary Yacoob. Collaborations include symposia, publications (including the forthcoming , exhibitions and a residency at Flat Time House in London, in 2020.

Diagram Workshop 'Plague of Dreams'

ICA, London (2015)

Diagram of Human/Non-Human Viral Mutation (2011)

Chalk on blackboard

Other important collaboration include Working with the artists’ group BANK and Plastique Fantastique .

Summoning the Bitcoin Fairy

Neon Festival, Newcastle (2017)

Hey see me?? Life is short/love is forever grounded @ figure plenty (2017)

Card and acrylic

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