The mole and the snake at Public Gallery, London

The animal of disciplinary society is the mole, moving through predetermined spaces, settings and institutions of confinement. The snake is the animal of neoliberal control society, to which disciplinary society has yielded. The rigidity of disciplinary confinement is no longer suited to post-industrial, immaterial and networked forms of production. In contrast to the mole, the snake makes space by means of its own movement. The mole is the labourer; the snake is the entrepreneur.

Public Gallery is pleased to present The mole and the snake, a trio exhibition of works by Faysal Altunbozar, Alex Hutton, and Russell Perkins. Taking reference from Byung-Chul Han’s essay Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, this exhibition considers how everyday objects structure our desires, how systems of power and control impose on individual subjectivities, and how these systems can be rendered visible through popular culture, emphasizing gamification, risk and pleasure.

Russell Perkins’ practice most directly concerns the increasing financialization of culture, considering how risk, precarity and economic imperatives register on individuals, and can be traced through the aesthetics of the banal. Perkins’ projects – which have ranged from translating live data from the European Energy Exchange into a sonic environment, or writing poetry by sampling words from quarterly earnings conference calls of every company on the SP 100 index – have required collaboration with detectives, poker players, AI researchers and financial market participants. Speculation is perhaps his primary subject matter, but how it is aestheticised, sonically, visually or otherwise varies across his multimedia practice. Your Numbers (2024), a series of UV ink and latex on PVC, take their form from American lottery scratch cards. The work plays on risk and desire – the adrenaline riddled gamification, coupled with the potential of individual exceptionalism, even when the odds are impossibly stacked against the player. Han’s opening line, quoting Jenny Holzer, speaks directly to this psychosis: “Protect me from what I want.”

Thinly layered oil on linen paintings convey with representational accuracy Alex Hutton’s obsession with structures of relational dependency. In this new body of work, Hutton weaves together wooden planks and joists impaled by beams of white light, as if raining sunshine into his dark enclosures. His practice attends to our increasing interdependence, and how these dynamics shift with the transformations escorted by new technologies, echoing Han’s note, “instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.” Using wide, choppy brushwork, Hutton’s visual staccato of painted lines teeters between Greenbergian flatness and unresolved, anxious structures of immense depth. Microsoft’s early advertising slogan read “Where do you want to go today?” as if endless paths were at our disposal, offering unbound freedom and communication. Yet, as Han argues, it is our very “freedom” to choose, take risks, desire and communicate at an instant that has made us vulnerable to dependency, control and surveillance. Hutton’s subject matter – rollercoasters, the boardwalk, structures of entertainment, amusement and play – calls to mind these ideas, generating questions of visibility, obfuscation and risk.

Faysal Altunbozar’s work often concerns mapping; his series of wall-based panel sculptures resemble river beds weaving through topographical surveys, or perhaps skeletal, almost vestigial structures embossed in amber fossils about the size of an iPhone. His Carrier sculptures trace his movement through parks and bird sanctuaries on the North Side of Chicago, among other cruising men, collecting rocks, dirt, and sometimes seeds in the cavities of his sneaker soles. With these works, Altunbozar imagines a scenario where plant intelligence instrumentalizes the cruising body to spread their seeds, influenced in part by Jack Halberstam’s notion of “wildness” – broadening the question of interdependence to one of interspecies alliance. In developing his Carrier series, Altunbozar uncovered that the bird sanctuary was a byproduct of US military intervention, where honeysuckle bushes were planted to conceal a Cold War era missile array, serendipitously resulting in its later popularization as a cruising hotspot. One’s movements can be dictated by instinct and desire; and yet, cruising can also be read as motivated by risk and gratification, seemingly congruent with the psychological work of neoliberal governance. Han warns against the camouflage and subterfuge of contemporary control society; perhaps it is the idea that we are free that names us subjects.

Psychopolitics concerns the crisis and exploitation of freedom, compounded by the total control and surveillance proffered by networked consumer capitalism, social media’s increasing resemblance to a digital panopticon, and Big Data’s highly efficient instrumentalization of social communication, where ‘data is not surrendered under duress so much as it is offered out of need.’ The mole and the snake aims to question whether free will is incompatible with contemporary society, revealing our collective willingness to compete, self-optimize, and expose ourselves to systems of control and manipulation. Are we really ever free to act solely on desire, to take risks of our own accord, to make decisions for ourselves, to choose?

Faysal Altunbozar (b. 1993, Istanbul,­ Turkey), is an interdis­ci­pli­nary­ artist who creates discrete objects and spatial interventions that layer cultural histories and playful allusions to the body in order to reframe dichotomies of power and pleasure. An MFA recipi­ent­ from the School of the Art Institute­ of Chicago,­ his work has been exhibited internationally. His recent solo and duo exhibi­tions­ were present­ed­ at Prairie (Chicago, USA), Space P11 (Chicago, USA, and Amazigh Contem­po­rary­ (Chicago, USA & Amsterdam, NL), Roots & Culture (Chicago, USA); Farnsworth House (Plano, IL) and Matadero Madrid (Madrid, Spain). He is the recipi­ent­ of the John W. Kur­ tich Travel­ Fellow­ship,­ Shapiro Center­ Gradu­ate­ Research Fellow­ship­ Award, and New Artist Society­ Scholar­ship­. He is living and working in London, UK.

Alex Hutton (b. 1992, Stuart, FL, USA) lives and works in New York. Hutton’s paintings often devolve into staccato painted lines and wet-on-wet color smears that veer towards total abstraction, as he explores the sensitive compression of histories layered on our cities, landscapes, and all manner of places in between and seeks to engage with the culture of forms that grows out of this process. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2014, and is currently based in Brooklyn. His work has been exhibited recently at Shrine, Europa, and Louis Reed in New York, NY; Amity, Brooklyn, NY; and 5-50 Gallery, Long Island City, NY. His work has been written about in The New York Times and Maake Magazine.

Russell Perkins (b. Chicago, IL, USA) works across media and often collaboratively. Made with forensic scientists, professional poker players and financial market participants, his projects investigate economies of risk and precarity. His work has been shown at the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain de Bordeaux, the Seine Musicale, the Frac Île-de-France, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, Kunsthalle Basel, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, the New York LGBT Center, and the Abrons Art Center. Residencies include the Fondation Fiminco and Artistes en résidence in Clermont-Ferrand. Perkins received the Lumen Prize 2022 Futures Award, the 2022 Elephant Trust Award, and the Most Beautiful Swiss Books Award 2022. Previously, he was a Queer|Art Fellow and Lazarus Curatorial Fellow at The Artist’s Institute. Publications include Queer Property, in Inheritance: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Daniel Monk and Suzanne Lenon (Bloomsbury). He received an MA in philosophy from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and an MFA from Hunter College in 2018.