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WHITECHAPEL GALLERY | 6 - 9 SEPTEMBER 2018
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Studio SFCH presents four publications by:
A collective fighting hegemony, a philosopher throwing books in holes, a worldwide organisation, immigrants, innocent workshop participants, talking particles, giant ears, a werewolf and a dog – all under the guise of four students and alumni of the Royal College of Art.
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We are inviting you to: flip our pages, talk to us, debate our designs and/or desires, listen to our whispers, follow our instructions, disobey, and exchange currency for joy.
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Yours, Cicilia Östholm, Alexandra Parry, Dasha Loyko, and Sofya Chibisguleva.
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RECOVERY MODE
The thick present, one that drags the past and always already implies the future, built on fact and speculation, plastics and gardening, bombings and tenderness, contaminated by the human and the non-human, one that has space for empathy, the only kind of present there is.
Recovery Mode generates narratives for and about living in the contemporary infospace.
Andrea Khôra is probing for new passageways through matted webs of ecological connections. Her sculptural installations Subscendence Capsule and Stargate Revisited offer experiences inside the human impulse to control, and the unexpected consequences that can result.
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For Recovery Mode, Khôra invites you to share the gallery with the life and sound of over 500 tiger worms inside a crystalline capsule and to participate in a renewed CIA Experiment to uncover bodily experiences of controversial geoengineering projects.
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Dasha Loyko’s quasi-archaeological display about the event of discovery of eight Golden Sphincters picks up fragments from physics, geography, and religion, to generate a hybrid narrative that functions as a contemporary pagan creation myth. Both erotic and enigmatic, the jewel-like Sphincters become artefacts, portals, and eventually the basis for a new conception of spacetime.
Loyko uses the tools and authoritative tropes of scientific method to mitigate uncertainty and legitimise speculation. Both the video work and the installation investigate systems of knowledge-generation and the seductive power of narrative.
Ralph Pritchard’s latest work is a fragmentary scene from a proposed larger work examining how a fraught personal relationship can be situated within a wider political crisis. The father and son dialogue shown here melds Pritchard’s earlier experience in political journalism with his ongoing concerns about emotional labour and the struggle to be compassionate.
Andrea Khôra, Dasha Loyko and Ralph Pritchard are three Critical Practice students at the RCA who share a studio, known informally as The Cave.
@cave.rca #caveRCA