SNOW CRASH

DIANN BAUER & A.S.T
AMANDA BEECH
MELANIE JACKSON
PIL & GALIA KOLLECTIV
ROY CLAIRE POTTER
TAI SHANI
LINDA STUPART
LYNTON TALBOT
BONES TAN JONES

CURATED BY
KIRSTEN COOKE

11 JANUARY - 10 MARCH 2019

INSTALLATION VIEW

Photo by Marta Esteban

A scaffolding structure will pierce the dividing wall at IMT gallery; the partition acting as a mirror that reflects the physical diagram across the two spaces.
SNOW
CRASH
SNOW
CRASH
Its anatomy is already doubling, self-replicating across the bifurcated gallery.

Snow Crash is a speculative architecture for alternative infrastructures that is flexibly built to respond to the artworks it houses. Artworks that exist in tension with the framework and will impinge on it, spill out from it and will be performed in and around the physical diagram. Assembled out of scaffolding, Snow Crash renders its own configuration visible and provisional, with the potential to be reformulated and adapted to future contexts. Snow Crash’s diagrammatic structure facilitates the ability for the autonomous artistic practices to go off in different directions but to reside in one place, enabling us to consider the complexity of the collective and the equally complex infrastructures that could support it. Snow Crash produces a project that thinks of itself as a scaffold, as opposed to a container, and as a result has the propensity to suggest alternative and expansive forms of viewing art.

INSTALLATION VIEW

Photo by Marta Esteban

Regular exhibitions are delimited by gallery walls – fixed, solid, square – not like the sprawling scaffold IMT’s group show is built around. No two sections are the same. It’s asymmetrical; also amendable, provisional; scalable, too. It can support limitless additions and varying configurations. Curated by Kirsten Cooke, ‘Snow Crash’ poses a framework for building and understanding infinitely complex, expansive systems.

INSTALLATION VIEW

Photo by Marta Esteban

I want to fuck you like an animal. I want to macerate you, absorb and metabolize you. I want to make you cry.’ A loose-haired woman aims a rock broodingly at the camera, arms uplifted through bleeding sunlight. Tai Shani’s video I Am Paradise (2017), screened next to Stupart’s projection, features an AI answering back to its creator. Scaffolding intercepts the works with materials evocative of subsistence activities: above Stupart’s, a makeshift cardboard shelter; in front of Shani’s, a ridged steel batten. Dislodging us from our neutral viewing positions, the scaffolding around these works invokes discomfort to challenge the omnipotence of the curator and, by extension, the audience.

SNOW CRASH

IMT Gallery (2019)
Photo by Marta Esteban

To accompany the exhibition we commissioned the essay I’m not a raisin, just an apprehensive M&M by Lynton Talbot. Read it here

The exhibition also included two live performances: After the Ice, the Deluge by Linda Stupart on the 7 March, and Rich Curtains: Performance of Stile by Roy Claire Potter on 9 March.

LINDA STUPART

After the Ice, the Deluge

ROY CLAIRE POTTER

Rich Curtains: Performance for Stile

SUPPORTED BY: