WHEN : 6th – 8th December
WHERE : Boxcopy
Altered States brings together video works by three artists interested in processes of transformation, translation and distraction, and the unreliable transmission of information. Jon Rafman restages the fast-paced, high-adrenaline experience of first-person shooter video gaming as a melancholic, wandering Bildungsroman: a search for past places, lost memories and meaningful encounters. Serena Korda converts the codified gestures and sounds of frenzied 1950s teenage rock fans into slow, stylised choreography, building a cryptic new narrative around the dancers’ trancelike movements and eerily expressionless cries. Sarah Rara’s chain of minor events and reactions—a spinning stone, coloured smoke, a burning candle—is both a sequence of formal experiments with light, time, transparency and filtering, and a hypnotic meditation on meaning-making and causal reasoning. All three artists explore themes of ritual, memory, simulation and mystery, and employ false histories or tactics of delay and displacement to create alienating sensory experiences. The works selected for Altered States are also characterised by a tension between sound and vision that evokes peculiar oscillations of attention and distraction in the viewer.
Serena Korda is a British artist whose recent works focus on the development of invented traditions that highlight ritual in the everyday. She has exhibited at galleries including Camden Arts Centre and the Wellcome Collection, London; Turner Contemporary, Margate; and New Art Gallery Walsall and has undertaken residencies in Whitstable, English; Czech Republic; and Paris.
Jon Rafman is a Canadian artist who explores the impact of digital technology on memory, history and the individual. He is represented by Future Gallery, Berlin; Seventeen Gallery, London and Zach Feuer Gallery, New York and has exhibited at the Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmo; the New Museum, New York; and The Fridericianum, Kassel. His work has been featured in Modern Painters, Frieze, The New York Times and Artforum.
Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles-based artist working across video, film, photography and performance and a member of the band Lucky D.
Curated by Marianne Templeton.
