Thursday, 24th of September 2015, at 6pm
Open Studio, end of residency with Theo Turpin and Louis Henderson
Embassy of Foreign Artists
“The young French romantics, les jeunes France (would shout) Le romantisme, c’est la révolution. Révolution against what? Apparently against everything.”
Isaiah Berlin
For this exhibition Theo Turpin and Louis Henderson will show individual works and a collaborative piece that set out to explore the relationship between romance and technology. Combining the languages of film, new media, advertising and protest the resulting work sets out to question the potential for a new “Romantic” revolution.
The two artists have been residents of The Embassy of Foreign Artists since July; the works that create this exhibition are the result of ongoing discussions around the potential for a new type of Romanticism, one which is not born out of the flames of industry, but written in the clouds of the virtual.
The collaborative piece Romantic Technologies is exactly this, a fragmentary email exchange between the two artists, a rapid response of quotes and opinions with a sporadic, collage approach to its subjects. Turpin’s work Le Romantisme C’est La Révolution adopts the same ethos of ‘collage’; it takes its title, and content, from an untraceable quote from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, re-presenting it as a radical proposition dressed in the language of advertising.
Henderson’s piece All Fixed Fast Frozen Relations, based on a work of the same name originally made for a USB stick and a computer desktop – is a screen recording of a folder of gradiated monochromatic jpegs randomly displaying themselves on the desktop of a laptop. In this remixed version, fragments of text from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Communist Manifesto of 1848 are displayed over the top of the colours fading in and out as a series of short slogans.
