The fifth and last exhibition at Gallery 207 of the winter season 2019/2020 presents the work of David Nosek, who is in the first year of a long course of study for a master’s degree, at the Studio of Painting. He works with themes such as fatalism, destruction, climate crisis and the endangerment of the Earth, examining them in the context of everyday life. This approach is also evident in the exhibition at Gallery 207, which is named, Feed Me Like a King, and is based on the aesthetics of fire. Fire appears in photographs which have been arranged on the basis of their outer affinities by an algorithm. The result is a fusion of film shots, funny collages, violence, car crashes and real ecological disasters.
This summer, photographs of forest fires flooded the mainstream media throughout the world. Even though this phenomenon is nothing extraordinary – fires like these break out every year – they became the media’s principle topic for several weeks. For as long as media attention was focused on the fires, we found our planet on the edge of the apocalypse. The ambiguity of the connection between reality as presented by the media and the truth, and also our inability to judge the situation and react, are among the main problems of our time. The viral potential of some kinds of content can cause us to give some information more importance than it deserves. On the other hand, really important information can be lost in a chaotic stream of banalities. Our feeds on social media – the main source of information – are constructed by multinational companies, which have their own specific political interests. Proliferation of specific pictures can be used to manipulate the public, which accepts any kind of solution suggested to it.
Ecological “crisis management”, under the control of the global bank cartel, can signify a future in which the precarity of life conditions is interpreted as an unavoidable consequence of climate crisis. The burnt offering to Moloch of the global techno-capital, which is lit by farmers from South America by burning forests, is – under the pressure of catastrophical pictures on social media – multiplied by our own sacrifice: we accept worse quality of life to preserve our status quo. Enviromentally conscious anti-natalism and the disappearance of material ownership goes alongside with permanent housing crisis and a lifestyle based around empty hedonism, short-term consumption and commodification of human relationships. The future, caught in a vicious circle of in-growing time preference is a real antithesis of any sustainable development. Everything burns.
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