Update: new pieces

Essay and two things in frieze :)

Hey!

How are you? A straightforward update from me today – a new text for a gallery, as well as two pieces in a magazine.

As part of Iarlaith Ni Fheorais’s Speech Sounds programme at VISUAL, I was commissioned to write about speculative strategies; themes of communication and language; the disabled and modified body, be that human, non-human, fictional or historical; and the politics of imagination.

I also have two new pieces published in frieze recently. A review of an exhibition exploring ideas of power, masculinity and gaming; and a profile of Pilot Press, an independent publishing project with an extraordinary 4 year history.

It’s always a bit of a coincidence that these were published so closely together, but each are representative, I think, of artistic approaches that understand questions of style, formal challenges and context in distinctly political terms. There are a few pieces on the horizon that I am excited to share, too!

Speak soon,

Chris

Image by Bassam Al-Sabah, courtesy Gasworks, London.

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Against bold visions
An essay by Chris Hayes for Speech Sounds, bringing a critical perspective towards the politics of art, hope and imagination

Institutional interest in speculative projects and the use of fiction is often driven by a desire for a straightforward politics of hope. Curators and directors understand how such programming can be easily marketed with hollow statements about imagining new worlds, and in turn, position the institution as radical, experimental and brave. Yet, just as often as the content relies on cliches and tropes, the organisation itself is hardly a model for how bold new worlds could be constructed; instead, relying on highly-stratified hierarchies and dubious corporate agendas. The gallery as a site of ‘play’ and ‘imagination’ is not empowering if actual material efforts completely undermine the supposed politics of publicly-stated aspirations.

https://visualcarlow.ie/art-ideas/against-bold-visions

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Bassam Al-Sabah’s Shapeshifting Avatars
At Gasworks, London, the artist queers the conventional masculinity of the action-adventure video game.

Much of ‘I AM ERROR’ is surprising. Al-Sabah’s hyper-synthetic aesthetic is at times seductive but often repellent, exploiting these human-adjacent CGI figures to channel personal experience. Across the films and objects, the exhibition resists easy readings of the aesthetics of violence, power and an extractive relationship towards the environment; as much as we see scenes of destruction, the return and resilience of nature – particularly the flowers which sprout from the character – suggests resurgence, even tenderness. Al-Sabah’s articulation of identity shirks a comfortable narrative direction for something more complex, difficult to untangle and ultimately rewarding.

https://www.frieze.com/article/bassam-al-sabahs-shapeshifting-avatars

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Richard Porter Wants to Make ‘Queer’ Weird Again
Pilot Press’s hit ‘Queer Anthology’ series is coming to an end after four years – what’s next for the indie publisher?

The legacy of queer art and writing is more than an aesthetic or historical footnote to Porter: it represents radical morality based around care, equality and freedom, and a body politics that resists the professionalization of the art world and the commodification of queer life. ‘I’ve always felt that the AIDS crisis is why we had the yBas,’ he told me. ‘AIDS decimated so much of culture that we then had to endure a decade of straight white British people making banal art that eventually sold for millions. I want to reclaim the weirdness of the word “queer”: its difference, its danger.’

https://www.frieze.com/article/richard-porter-pilot-press-queer-anthology