Art Licks Weekend 2017: The Rebellious Script

An exhibition of photographic installation and CNC sculpture scanning the area between the technological gaze and technocratic systems.

As part of Art Licks Weekend 2017, two artists with studios at Bow Arts in East London are mounting a show at A-Side B-Side Gallery in Hackney from September 29th until October 1st.

Why are the tallest buildings so often erected at times of financial crisis? Artist Amanda Lwin poses this question in a two-person show with Geoff Titley at A-Side B-Side Gallery in London’s Mare Street. The show, The Rebellious Script is mounted in response to the theme of this year’s Art Licks Weekend 2017, Finding Solutions.

Through a mix of photography (Geoff Titley) and CNC sculpture (Amanda Lwin), the exhibition scans the area between the technological gaze and technocratic systems in an attempt to expose fragments of this partial script that underpins the systems and monuments that are a product of our worldview.

Lwin’s perforated metal objects allude to electronic hardware, financial wizardry, esotericism and mystic religion – creating objects that are both familiar and strange, everyday and incomprehensible.

Titley, in turn, visits the natural landscape and offers his interpretation of a technological view through recursive imaging and the seeds of inceptionism.

The duo suggests that while the history of human life is an extended narrative of problem solving, the heady mix of late capitalism and advanced digital proves an irresistible force in expanding our ‘systems’ and building further and ever greater monuments.

The show’s title, The Rebellious Script, is a term borrowed from Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 book Sapiens describing the ‘partial script’ of mathematics and accountancy. Harari explains that while this incomplete script is unable to describe the full gamut of human interaction, it has nevertheless come to dominate our worldview.