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'Night Market Vol 1', a Group Show Curated by Klara Vincent-Novotna & Jonny Tanna at Harlesden High Street, London

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Night Market Vol. 1 is the first in a series of interventions exploring the bootleg as a distorted mirror of global Capital. Housed in the reconfigurable space of a gallery-cum-market and reflecting our mass-produced ambitions and nostalgias, the exhibited works command a chorus of unauthorized voices, which mutate around familiar and established characters and brands.

Any object of commodity follows a predictable curve: a spike in the market carves out room for a shadow economy of knock-offs, which allows consumers to engage or possess something they might not otherwise have access to. These, in turn, become objects of desire - performing an oblique dance with narratives of authenticity, visibility, and recognition which challenge the defined boundaries and definitions imposed by mass branding.

The thrill of possession and performance inherent to branding and retail is amplified by the slightly shady peculiarity of an unofficial copy or a back-alley supply chain, and fan-made media has the ability to destabilise the canon by altering or adding to the original storyline. This ultimately reflects demand; knockoffs exist in symbiotic dependence with the luxury brands, which need them in order to demonstrate insatiable, and wildfire desirability.

Unauthorized markets and other alternative sales outlets occupy a dual role in the commodity ecosystem of liquidating excess and steering it outside its intended audience. In particular, Western monoliths of branding and the conditions of material production that evince specific global hierarchies are both fed and disrupted by such vendors and their wares, which endlessly permutate a brand's reach while revealing inherent flaws and artifice.

As a creative practise, bootlegging suggests a poetic disregard for the norms of status-enforcing systems, negotiating class differences by adapting media and materials in inventive ways that resist the use value of the original, and using capital to do things it wasn't designed to do. Fan sites are more interesting than official ones, released albums are never as cool as their unofficial versions, and knockoff fashion hits the mark in ways the originals can only hint at; as a shape shifting shadow of something authentic, a bootleg says more than an original ever could.

The works assembled here act as material remainders that exceed the parameters of a given historical moment or even a given material artifact; vibrating across leylines of collective memory and affect, they unleash the potential to alter hegemonic aesthetic forms. Half-doppelganger and half-thief, we signal the death of the legitimate form while paradoxically engaging its aura as a signpost of pure desire.

Night Market vol.1 presents a collection of such forms - illicit, janked up, unauthorized, and immeasurably alluring. Everything you could possibly want starts here: under moonlit awning, illuminated in faint glow.

28.4.19 — 5.6.19

Stacie Ant, Jim Feng, Ala Flora, Simon Hanselmann, Lawrence Hubbard, Castell Lanko, Charlotte-Maëva Perret, Lydia Mathis, Alex Rathbone, Gemi Tan, Jaqueline Ruther aka Mizucat, Dave Sayre, Ruini Shi, Jack Stevenson, KK Jiao, Ray Tat, Twee Whistler, Shek Retta, Jyn Wye, Youada, Young Girls Reading Group

Curated by Klara Vincent-Novotna & Jonny Tanna

Harlesden High Street

'Cosmovisions', Group Show at Medusa Offspace, Brussels

'No Time To Explain' by Paul Robas at Solito, Naples

'Night Rider' by Yan Posadsky at Devyatnadtsat’, Moscow

'Funding Emotions' by Magnus Frederik Clausen and Kaare Ruud at Cantina, Aarhus

'What I felt for you was love', Group Show at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'Mirror Stage' by Bora Akinciturk and Ella Fleck at Shipton, London

‘Millions Now Living Will Never Die!’ by Ian Swanson at Plague Space, Krasnodar

'VEGAN' by Jack Jubb at house of spouse, Vienna

'Fresh Hell' by Jonah Pontzer at Rose Easton, London

'It's quite like Guggenheim', Group Show at Ringcenter 1, Berlin

'OUTER DARKNESS', Off-Site Project by Allyson Packer in 1698 GALISTEO, SANTA FE

'mareas' by Elizabeth Burmann at Galeria Patricia Ready, Santiago

'Vape Cloud Premonition' by Sam Hutchinson at Forth, Nottingham

'Punch-Drunk' by Yutaro Ishikawa at LAID BUG, Tokyo

'Le sort des Labourgue' by Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard at Les Capucins, E

'All is Full of Love' by Michiel Ceulers at Pizza Gallery, Antwerp

½, Group Show at Devyatnadtsat’ gallery, Moscow

'Shady Garden' by Immanuel Birkert at Galerie Tobias Naehring, Leipzig

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