Year.. 2007
Apple released the first iPhone, Britney Spears returned with “Gimme More” after shaving her head, the Global Financial Crisis began amid the subprime mortgage collapse, the US troops’ military invasion of Iraq had its deadliest […]
Sophie présente: 𝟐𝟎𝟎𝟕, a group exhibition that observes a resurgence of Dada-like strategies, focusing particularly on how the economy influences aesthetics, whether through speculative abstractions and networked systems or via the mass circulation of cheap, ephemeral goods.
The works evoke a dense web of signs, symbols, and cultural references, echoing the ghostly trail of a fast-moving system. Domestic and commercial products are reused as ecological and economic means: wrapping paper, wool, cheap frames, plastic banners, pruned branches, jewelry, car parts, synthetic hair… The information they conceal and the previous relationship they had with the artists are carried in their work. Embodied in the materials is an opportunity for a true perception of the times we live in.
A time where political and economic discourse has grown absurd, spinning aimlessly through networks. Language devolves into noise, and our capacity to communicate ideas, emotions, or truths begins to erode. Numbers, by contrast, seem to offer clarity: equations model systems, statistics reveal patterns, and data act as a mirror. This is manifested in the frantic gestures of pointillist dots on a painting or in the network created by a quilted pattern on a textile piece. Numbers are not physical objects, but they are real in effect — it’s the stock market, it generates crazy images, demonstrates patterns, participates in war strategies, shows us how many apples we have […]
> Money doesn’t lie! said the group chat
> Ugh… said the depressed recession girl
> Zoooooing!! said the machine
In 1916, German poet and Dadaist Hugo Ball wrote: “The war is founded on a glaring mistake – men have been confused with machines.” This idea, that modernity transforms people into mechanical extensions, echoed through the works of John Heartfield and George Grosz, particularly in their cyborg-like mannequin Der wildgewordene Spiesser Heartfield (1920), or in Hannah Höch’s collages and puppets. Her rendered dolls, androgyne-girl-like figure, showing how dehumanized, stripped of agency, trapped within a patriarchal system women are. Did they know that we might want to become machines? That we were going to chat with a Simulated Neural Network, like it’s not crazy at all to talk to a surface composed of matrix operations and optimized algorithms. Maybe we relate to machines because we are transhuman after all: made of small particles of plastic, fueled by psychoactive functional beverages, and built by personalized ephemeral goods.
> Oh oh, I’m spiraling.. [0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …]