#iwroti

[k2modern]

I was raised on the internet. @mcachicago #iwroti #raised #internet #mcachicago (at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago)

[theclickofdeath]

Sophia Al-Maria - Black Friday [2016]

In Al-Maria’s view, the mall in both the Gulf and the United States—along with its attendant consumerism—occupies "a weirdly neutral shared zone between cultures that are otherwise engaged in a sort of war of information and image," waged through both traditional and social media. The proliferation of malls in the Gulf in the late 1990s and early 2000s is something Al-Maria witnessed firsthand, having been raised between Washington State and Qatar. Her new video, Black Friday, is a rumination on shopping malls everywhere as secular temples of capitalism. Beneath the projected video lies The Litany, an installation of flickering electronic devices displaying short, glitchy loops—a heap of old screens that acts as a coded history of consumption, conflict, and desire.

https://whitney.org/Exhibitions/SophiaAlMaria

The piece imposes; a grave for a giant. It conjures forth imagery of Borges’ tattered territory-covering map, though instead of tattered paper remains, we Animals and Beggars stumble upon iPhones with cracked screens displaying Google Maps.

Buried in the sand as they are, the screens suggest a human-less post-apocalyptic wasteland, though somehow magically, the screens remain on and functioning without us. All decays inevitably--biological or plastic, but some inevitabilities arrive sooner. This is but a snapshot of decay. An aesthetic of decay.