Artist: Benjamin Slinger
Exhibition title: Dungeon Inc.
Venue: Darren Flook, London, UK
Date: June 2 – July 8, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Darren Flook, London
Benjamin Slinger (Born 1990, She!eld, UK, lives and works in London) presents Dungeon Inc. their “rst solo show of sculpture, found objects and wall-based works at Darren Flook. In Dungeon Inc the artist builds upon their previous work with science “ction and strike action and here links role player games and the birth of the new economics of the 80s, an economic revolution the consequences of which are still being lived with and built upon today, into their own world of references and laws.
The starting point of the exhibition was Slinger’s research into role player games and the discovery that in the midst of mass privatisation and creeping monetisation ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ wobbled through a licensing issue which caused a stir in the tabletop gaming world, the ownership of one’s own fantasies seemed more and more tenuous. From that idea of capitalisms intersection with the personal and apparently private – which had been very present in Slingers last exhibition at Karin Guenther in Hamburg, Slinger started to conceive of a place where the politics of Reagan and Thatcher intersected with the games of imagination. Slinger merges the semiotics of civil disobedience, gameplay & collectables, and proposes political hyperbole as fantasy, economics as mysticism & politics as feudal warfare. Feudal CEO warlords, Reaganite Druids, Wallstreet Paladins “ll the crevices where neoliberalism and capitalism break apart. As the artist stated “Dungeon Inc. is a psycho-political installation that plays with the implications of socio-political happenings and their pop cultural hangovers via cues from medieval fantasy role playing games.”
Dungeon Inc, like a game, leaves clues and cross references, Obama’s Oval O!ce door is perfectly recreated as conceptual painting, a “gure lies on the ground, face covered with a sniper’s mask wearing a President Bush election T-shirt. A lenticular scan of a Reagan character from Spitting Image and walls lamps made from Financial Times mugs, Republican memorabilia and fake candle light electric bulbs. In the o!ce space Slinger has installed two works which are collections of trading cards, US presidential and role-playing games. The exhibition creates a whole, but a fractured and complex one, relating as it does to our private fantasies, the roles we play and world economics it feels appropriate that there is no neat resolution to this game.
