Artists: Marte Eknæs, Alice Khalilova, Santiago Taccetti
Exhibition title: Reboot Horizon
Venue: Cell Project Space, London, UK
Date: November 13, 2014 – January 11, 2015
Photography: Courtesy of the artists and Cell Project Space
When a page freezes on the syncopated browser of a web user, there is a moment of change in the landscape marked as a reduced distinction of it’s natural other, when it has been manipulated by technology. With a desktop tidy approach to the outdoors the exhibition reflects the increasingly conflated physical spaces of retail, business, and leisure. Often based on the criteria that these forms are highly evolved from nature through corporate and commercial branding, this streamlining allows for more efficient circulation.
Santiago Taccetti’s interest in high performance and compact portability introduces human modes of behavior making reference to the temporal characteristics of the natural environment and its potential risks. Set against digitally born raw fragments of mountain terrain Taccetti’s informational compression of geological form serves up a franchise of the earth’s hostile topography and the great outdoors. Eastern philosophy merges with digital flatness in the clean ergonomic hi-tec constructs of Alice Khalilova. Her use of amorphous form and streamline technology both imitate nature and celebrate the technology mediating it, creating a synthesised infiltration of the physical world and the virtual other. Khalilova highlights the potential for the computer to replace the objectified symbols, which we may rely on for comfort or well-being. Typical of Marte Eknæs’ strategy, is to choose fragments of product design and architecture that carry specific meaning particularly in controlled public space, where leisure and health have become the new re-territorialized domain for corporate profit and potential exploitation. Eknæs repurposes its function– she takes apart, combines and returns objects to what was almost there.
Included in the exhibition and central to the poster image is a supersized version of an orthopedic neck rest by Eknæs, a dumb body-tec punctuation of today’s mobilization of the body where the horizon changes as technology competes with the natural order of things. The rebooted horizon is the global traveller’s view conjuring up the exhibition’s intentions to make sense of the impact of speed, fossil fuel burning and deforestation and its uncomfortable physical implications and our complicit relationship with it.
