Presenting a new body of work and micro-climates, the artist duo (hailing from Istanbul and based in Brussels) introduces a thought-provoking inquiry into the 21st century development of artistic practices, and the current scope of human life from which it originates.
Orchestrated as a virtual render, ‘Generated Dreams’ draws initial focus to the physicality of our bodies. Simultaneously seducing and alienating, visitors are propelled to be both ultra-aware and dissociated from themselves and their surroundings. Navigating towards the main exhibition hall, ‘ELSEWHERE IS PARADISE‘- a micro-layered polyester and solar film curtain – distorts our overview of the show, imparting it with a blurred reflective filter whilst giving an illusory sense of privacy. A threshold, this prelude in the guise of a screen-like surface through which we can see a certain universe as well as our own mirrored selves. Light hues breathe in and out from ‘SLO-O-O-OW, 2301’, pulsating through the exhibition: a haunting forecast into the shapeshifting dynamic between humanity and technology.
The grand exhibition hall is populated by hybrid anthropomorphic creatures: ‘Alex’, ‘Taylor’ and ‘Morgan’ are three metal truss sculptures reminiscent of clubs and entertainment venues.
Their bodies creep through the space and echo the German artist Charlotte Posenenske’s (1930 – 1985) industrially and serially produced tubular shapes in galvanised steel, which she embraced as ready-mades to democratise both artistic production as well as the artistic experience (spectators were invited to become participants by assembling the modules to their own liking).
:mentalKlNIK’s contemporary successors however convey how this optimistic belief in technology has spiralled into a rampant, unmanageable paradigm-shift; a feverish spectacle society; a dystopian suffocation of all-consuming entertainment; flashing lights – never switched off. Modernism on speed.
The trusses are joined by ‘Billie’ and ‘Valentine’: two haunting, hollow human figures. They sit in stillness, indifferent and oblivious to our presence, detached from the world around them. Their bodies curl inward, faces hidden behind curtains of hair. Untouchable. Clad in the latest fashion, their appearance is meticulous even though their bodies appear to be of no use. A generation imploded by the crushing weight of the world, these young, lost souls serve as a reminder of the parallel universe they’ve escaped to—the virtual realm as their utopia. Screens have nearly replaced physical experience, with avatars living out our lives on our behalf. Happiness in an instagram post, click-and-share indignation, online activism, immaterial shopping bags and digital hook-ups; everything quantifiable in likes and visibility. Human awareness becomes a mere hallucination; living in the moment has spiralled into a performance of mindfulness. Subverting the optimist ideology of technological growth, the artists are seeking to provoke a certain unease. Reckoning with the new reality that we’re building, they are visualising a society motored by perpetual desire, notwithstanding the imminent decline of human agency. A world inhabited by slaves to a coded set of mutated instincts. These creatures, obscenely present in their lifelessness, exist in a scenery of paintings and pictures that play tricks on each other, on themselves and on us. Are they AI- generated, created by the artists’ hands, or digitally manipulated? In the ‘/Imagine ‘series, the artists present us a lush palette of still lives depicting sceneries of luxury and fetish. Pearls, gemstones and shimmering jewellery, polished lobsters and lacquered nails, meaty cherries and juicy lips. La Grande Bouffe, devoid of human fluids. ’28/05/2024 14:30 Create a realistic close-up photograph of a person’s mouth and chin area. The lips are pink and slightly parted, holding a pair of shiny, ripe red cherries by their stems. The cherries are positioned at the center of the image, hanging joutside the person’s mouth, the teeth holding the head of the stem and the cherries hang down to the chin area. The cherries’ surface is smooth and reflective, showing subtle light reflections. Ensure the image has a clean and realistic look, capturing the natural details of the lips, cherries, and surrounding skin. –v 6.0 – ar 4:5’ The image resulting from this prompt generated a pair of cherries as a piercing through the lips. In another picture, the cigarette bud is on the wrong side. This suddenly reminds us, didn’t Billie have three legs? For ‘Generated Dreams’, :mentalKLINIK – who already have a collaborative practice – collaborated with the rising star of our time, the artist that is AI. Through a back-and-forth dialogue, they layered questions, auto-generated responses and their own feedback or edits, to conjure works which continue the inquiry into authorship that has occupied art theory since Modernism liberated the artwork from the artist. They are interested in our linguistic structuring of the world, an intrinsically human trait currently being exponentially expanded with the integration of AI in our modus operandi. Images, and by consequence, the representation of the world and of ourselves, are acceleratingly coded by data and language. For now, the artists embrace the clumsy beginner’s mistakes that are characteristic of AI-generated’ work. Given the rapid pace of technological advancement and self-learning, the ‘naivety’ in these errors—where AI’s limitations are still evident—is celebrated as a fleeting gem.This exhibition thus performs a dense scala of online-offline glitches, confusions and tensions to excavate how life, art and entertainment exponentially morph into each other. Once separate, these arena’s of life are now tangled into an opaque bubble keeping humans occupied without pause. Allround and always, its mechanisms are downplaying our bodies into passive oblivion whilst keeping our minds non-stop connected to the virtual neo-capitalist vortex. Productivity, even when doing nothing, as an all-consuming religion. ‘HEY IT’S ME’ provokingly whispers mysterious messages from behind a galvanised steel sheet. An out-of-body experience. ‘a-piece-of-horizon’ further demarcates this inert and confusing environment. This “horizon for the new era” is made up of a series of wet and fake paintings, depicting abstract colour blocks, simultaneously echoing Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism; in limbo between mind and body. :mentalKLINIK’s recurring palette of fuschia pinks, nocturnal blacks, vivid reds and shimmering metallics gestures both the artists’ hands and technologic production processes. On a material level, these works come to life by hacking printers to mess with the wet pigment, adding gestural, expressionist strokes to the surface. The works are subsequently sealed off with a mirroring varnish, containing the liquids, the fluids, the uncontrollable: palatable and safe for our sanitised society. What’s the status of self-preservation and authenticity amidst this societal metamorphosis and the looming hegemony of AI on our way of thinking, doing, being? :mentalKLINIK brings these questions close, very close. The exhibition unfolds like a kaleidoscope, reflecting us in every direction. ‘Double Deal’ even multiplies our self-image, spinning it around in a full 360-degree swirl. There is no escaping the confrontation, unless we hark back to our phones. A quick selfie feels fitting.
– Text by Evelyn Simons