Exhibition Notes - Foreword Drafts
Here is some draft versions I wrote for our foreword to the magazine. These were just early drafts, but thought it was important to show the working. We had a chat in the last week (can't remember which day precisely) after the group had read my initial version of a ‘completed first draft’ and we made some notes and I got some feedback on what it needs to improve.
Hope is a strange concept. It is consistently vulnerable and often works to deceive us, particularly in the world of politics, social order and the environment. We live in a time where hope often feels lost; with the looming shadow of brexit, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness in the Trumpian landscape, robots that send missiles on third world families and fires the size of countries that ravage humanity, hope begins to look and feel like morphine. A synthetic anaesthesia, that gushes over us and we can relax, sip our coffee or beer and feel like everything is under control… when its not. This aesthetic, however, is not Hope so do not be fooled. It is not an invisible entity, designed to relax our minds, it is instead a graspable feeling, a drive, to enrage us, to empower our our will, to fight for life. Hope is the desperation to survive, to grab hold of those who corrupt our worlds with economy and moral ambivalence by the collar and force change. These pages, these projects that you gaze upon; they are hope, they are the physical representation of expressing that we do not accept this world that has been designed without our consent. What you will find here is rebellion, what you will find here is fear, what you find here is chaos, but most of all what you will find in these pages is hope in the darkness.
Reality is a liquid currency, much like that of time or truth. It is a malleable concept, one that no single individual can pinpoint, despite the consistent attempt to do so. Throughout history, lives have been fraught with the struggle to comprehend what reality is and where our place is in it. Can we prescribe a single notion of this concept to every being alive on earth today… if what Greek Philosopher Parminedes argued is true; that reality is self contained - an individual experience, then the answer would suggest no. Our experience in a general sense, relies so heavily on our access to ideas such as liberty, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, economic control and even more basic access to shelter, fresh water, a hot meal and so on. I presume that whoever may be reading this has access to a majority of these daily elements and thus the point can be made that many people, in fact an unimaginable, incalculable amount of people do not have these - and I use this word in the context of this piece trepidatiously - privileges. Therefore proving that reality differs due to the context of circumstances. It would be easy to make a juxtapositional comparison between the UK and say the poorest provinces in China or or the Eastern blocks of Siberia, yet our reality is so far removed from those circumstances it hardly proves a point. Take America for example; both have English as their first language, both rely on a system of capital,
Reality is a liquid currency, much like that of time or truth. It is a malleable concept, one that no single individual can pinpoint, despite the consistent attempt to do so. Throughout history, lives have been fraught with the struggle to comprehend what reality is and where our place is in it. Can we prescribe a single notion of this concept to every being alive on earth today… if what Greek Philosopher Parminedes argued is true; that reality is self contained - an individual experience, then the answer would suggest no.
Snow gently falls in London as I simultaneously write this and day dream outside my window. There is something magical or mystical about snow, and not just in its texture, rather in the way it looks and particularly the way it falls. Rain — a constant in these periods of British winter — is heavy and immediate, its there and its frequent and it hits you instantaneously. Snow glides, it swooshes and sways, it blankets and sparkles in the light. These are probably socially or culturally cultivated notions; we associate snow with festive cheer or holidays, movies many people grew up on and childhood excitement at the spectacle of seeing it for the first time. Arguably snow is most often described as beautiful or associated with fun; that its pure and represents calm or happiness, but this isn’t altogether a truism of snow. Lets come back to that shortly.
Its becoming a cliche to say this but nonetheless true; we live in extremely uncertain times. This is not just in a national sense, but a very broad global sense. Cracks that had existed for decades, possibly centuries, have recently turned into chasms that seem to cause larger and larger divisions on a daily basis. On an immediate level, we can see that reflected in the Brexit referendum that has dominated social and cultural discourse over the last few years in Britain, America elected a now proven criminal in Trump who has essentially sanctioned racist and bigoted behaviour and given rise to white nationalism. There has been a disturbing rise in white nationalism more broadly too, with worrying signs coming out of Sweden, Germany and Eastern Europe. In 2008 there was the financial crash, not a warning sign but the result of many warning signs that left people without homes, food and in many cases without lives. Most worryingly from this however, is not that this happened, and that was and still is extremely disturbing, but rather that financial experts are prediction that the same thing will happen again because nothing has been learned. Perhaps most disturbing of all is our environment and our lack of care for it. Environmental scientists are practically shouting at the top of their lungs that we need to change and if we do not, the consequences are going to be beyond repair… Safe to say, uncertain times indeed.
I (shamefully) only just read Orwell’s ‘1984’ for the first time, having heard pretty much everything there was to hear about it. Yet, I was still shocked not just to find parallels to our current predicament, but direct links and instances where reality felt rather Orwellian. So we come to the nature of reality. Its a loaded term, each of us have our own reality that we share in a larger reality. French critic, theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that in photography there is no link to reality, rather that photographs represent a ‘Hyperreality’ that either shows us a real version of something that doesn’t exist, or presents something to us that we know is real but cannot admit to its existence. This may be true of our political, social and cultural worlds. A good example to take would be the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before 1975, the Soviet government attempted to create a socialist economy and society, to make the union better for its people and a stronger power to the rest of the world. This attempt did not last long as very soon it began to collapse. Instead of admitting to the people that this was the case, those in power suggested that this was all part of the plan. What was produced was a society whereby the people knew that their state had failed, the lawmakers and government powers knew they had failed and yet everyone went on pretending like nothing was happening. The microcosm of this can be seen in the events that took place in Chernobyl.
It seems that we are existing in a reality that his hyperreal. We know the environment is suffering. We know that the rise of nationalism leads to wars and ethnic hatred. America pretends to define itself on its constitution yet when children are murdered at their place of education, very little is done to stop guns, rather its the fault of everything else but the gun control. I do not say any of this accusatorially, I am as guilty as anyone of not doing enough, and idly ‘watching on’. I write this purely out of talking to people, observing, reading and putting two and two together. At times I do feel that this is true, and to come back to snow, that what we are looking at isn’t as beautiful as we think. Rather that this ‘snow’ of our world often causes destruction and can also blanket us from understanding what is real and what is not.
However, we cannot despair and we should not despair. There is reason to have hope, as dangerous as that word can be.
