Take Me To Your Leader –
A group show as part of Art Sheffield Festival of contemporary art, 2016, curated by Martin Clark. I was one of five artists in this show:
When living under Ming the Merciless, finding and defending your own
planet is no joke.
Negotiating terms in your chosen language risks drastic
misunderstandings, or slipping into the inept script.
It might mean resorting to the corny or ham-fisted line; or invite the
alienation of confronting the unfamiliar.
Take me to your Leader subjects you to mild peril and disorientation
as it plunders worlds within imagined worlds, mines the
astronomical in the everyday, and contemplates paradoxical
objects and post-apocalyptic calamity.
Made North Gallery, Persistence Works, May 2016.
My work in the exhibition was called Game On.
It consisted of two videos, painted mixed media and a savoy cabbage.
This is the text I wrote for it:
" A games console to delight and frustrate the imagination - in making
this work I have been thinking about retro sci-fi and computer games,
war games - power games. The console is a site of creation and
destruction, power and powerlessness. It can engage and distract.
Standing at the controls, the decisions are ours - we have the freedom
to imagine, to play, to take action. Faced with the objects and spaces
in front of us, including those spaces that open up in the mind,
you can be the pilot or the passenger. Or the Time Lord.
But is that freedom as real as it feels? Have we been manipulated?
Are we collaborators? Perhaps we are willing slaves. Perhaps we are
aliens on someone else’s planet.
The low tech temporary structures, the tentative experimental things,
the thoughts that range across form and surface, know that they don’t
have long to get the message across. They do what they can.
They resist, they open up, they give clues.
Take your place at the controls.
Game On."
maja mihajlovic 