Artist: Asbjørn Skou
Exhibition title: Algrthm Shudr
Venue: HUTT, Nottingham, UK
Date: June 8 – July 30, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and HUTT, Nottingham
“Nottingham 1816. Flashing from fires of broke stocking frames. The giant Head of State floating above the city as a curse. Voices of the opposition drowned in spite, pestilence and wage labour. Everyone is in debt. Server-beings, multiplex non-organisms, a pack of victorian ghosts envisioning society as a vast machine, programmable and algorithmic. Posterity is leaking. Chemically sour as summer broke awesome, smelling of teargas.
“Socially necessary Labour time”. Necrotic tissue of fixed capital – wormfuckers. Fluorescent magic numbers, dates of mourning and the riots that previously performed time as something becoming. The law a mouth, the police force a mouth, everything that those opaque suits labelled a condition of the ersatz productive power, by labour by year, by the reverberations of bailouts and job-centres. Enigmatic radiation, incantations and quarantines. August 1816, 2012, 2021 – you can take the dates and turn them into a magical equation. A vacuum against the day.
The breathing societies of industrial history swallowed mathematics, ghost bureaucrats, scab unions, forcefields and soforth. This city, full of abstract plagues, singing plagues of the precarious, metabolism – eating crisis & glass. The undead at the production wheel, that-which-labours sang the waiting oppression. To get clock on the future – labour one into the ground, or something, basic grinding metaphor, on work.
Stoffwechsel of a ringing carbon vibrato, that devil steam. Each basilica a pore split open to a new 19th century. For the production of death-parties, particles molding to engage in some sad future carnival. Futures constructed on floating capital, machinery parades, new oddities, a chain form of anti-unemployment measures, nosferatu-time and the zombie bourgeois. History as a means to an end, sufficient for a dead totality.
Each gear, the means of a future, Comrade Ludd transformed, Stewed down to pulp, scraped up and sculpted and sold as a human. There are strategies to chant, sabotage, not today. It’s August and ahead of political succession time. Somewhere the engine loom, bastard of this logistical revolt, bare eaten fingers. After all Europe dies a commodity. Shudr and chant, that will out first! Our fists, dissolved in lethargic drool. Elsewhere all of the phosphorous data of innovation, parades eating fertilizers, Persephone reformed in that radiant technosphere. The years worth of organism in cash.”
Asbjørn Skou is a visual artist from Copenhagen, Denmark. He works with drawings, text, installation and objects, to stage and examine relations between human and nonhuman agencies, and their possibilities for production of crisis and critique. He holds a MFA from the Academy of Arts in Bremen, Germany. He has previously exhibited at among other; Kunsthal NORD (DK), Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (DK), Tranen – Contemporary Art Centre (DK), Museum of Cycladic Art (GR) Vejle Art Museum (DK), Ileana Tounta Contemporary Art Centre (GR), Munch Gallery (USA) Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EST), Photographic Centre (DK) Westwerk (DE) Rauma Art Museum (FL).
