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‘The Shooter's Drunk!’ by Laurence Sturla at Pina, Vienna

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A few centuries before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, a culinary practice in Tudor England amalgamated animals into hideous, spectacular meals, such as a suckling pigs head sewn onto the legs of a turkey. These dishes, exclusively used for display, stitched together parts of animals to create mythical beasts, monsters that deviate from the normal essence of a species and animate the otherwise dead matter.

The staging of these grotesque creatures on a long banquet table is a theatrical reminder of power and its ability to flip from rationality to barbarism. Sturla’s ceramic embodiments of these culinary glitches and para-possible creatures have been imagined with a similar sense of ornament. Ceramic, semi psychedelic, grotesque hybrid animals lay dead in the centre but the plates are reused as ashtrays, inviting people to use them and infusing these mad scientist creations with a sense of purpose and function.

Overlooked by the three horn blowers to guilds of trade; the fisherman, the farmers and the factory workers. These decorations outline a ragged, gaunt body, exhausted by the hunt, barely able to sound a horn and indicate the end of labour. This gathering marks the exceptional moment when the length of night meets the length of the day - a final flourish of a community before the working day gets longer and hampered by heat.

Sturla’s presentation, which includes furniture made from the ripped-up floorboards, is an eerie reminder that this gathering is no exception to the rule that every feast, by definition, is a state of exception or a state of emergency. We are led into a gothic installation where representations of labour meet that of power, an exhibition which brings the dead back to life and reminds us that the frameworks of a society obsessed with scheduling time are deeply rooted in the ghosts of industrialisation.

— James Lewis

21.3.18 — 10.5.18

Photo by Jennifer Gelardo

Pina

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London

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