Take me with you

Blok, Rolina, Claes, Koenraad, Hon, Gordon and Schady, Alex (2022) Take me with you. Take Me With You, , London, United Kingdom.

Abstract

6 Untitled Paintings and 7 music compositions for collaborative video "Songs for Dead Sculptures" with Alex Schady.
Curated by contributing artists, Alex Schady and Rolina Blok with Koenraad Claes and Gordon Hon. Based on different forms of artistic collaboration including with non-human objects.
Exhibition text: take me withh you... This exhibition is pitiful; it implores the viewer, like a desperate, jilted lover, a clingy friend or friendless sibling. It also commands, requests, offers and entreats. There may or may not be an implicit warning; an unspoken “or else …” containing an unspecified threat in its ellipsis.
We accept that we are, in WJT Mitchell’s words "stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes toward objects" and that our task is not to "overcome these attitudes," but neither is to understand them or "work through their symptomatology”.
If there is something pathological in our relationships to the inanimate objects that we produce then so be it; the objects will also be symptomatic of unhealthy relationships.
This exhibition assumes that objects have non-human agency; that this agency is unknowable and has nothing to do with the human appetites and desires projected on to them. It is beyond the reification of value and resists commodification. It will outlive capitalism and the human species. It lies dormant in a landfill, an unused scratch-card at the back of a kitchen drawer, a painting in an
empty gallery.
These collaborations are tactical, a way of escaping the claustrophobia of being alone with the work. A way of avoiding the co-dependency with an indifferent or even hostile object. It is an admission of defeat. We have conceded that we need help in dealing with these objects; that we need another human in the room.
take me with you is a two-episode project at The Koppel Project Hive. This exhibition is Part one of the project which will be open until 18 February 2022, followed by the second part bringing together at the gallery an Art School with staff and students from Central Saint Martins, City Lit, ENSAV La Cambre and The Royal Academy of Fine Art Antwerp.

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