Party in the Blitz

27 Jan-17 Mar 2023

PV 27 Jan 2023, 6-8pm

Overview

MAMOTH is thrilled to announce the group exhibition features work by Adriano Amaral, Charlotte Vander Borght, Robert Brambora, Ambra Castagnetti, Xavier Robles De Medina, Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Gaby Sahhar, Will Thompson, Waldemar Zimbelmann, opening on January 27.

Literature and art tap into an inherent human desire to imagine and to dream by expanding our common experience. One century ago, during the decade of the 1920’s the genre of science fiction exploded in popularity. RUR by Karel Čapek, and the works of H.G. Wells found eager audiences whose zeitgeist pined for the deliverance of modernity. It was in this context that Fritz Lang directed the film Metropolis (1927) whose technological scepticism and reflections on damaged social order still ring true today. The medium of the moving image has since transformed our connection with reality and the imagined deep future and deep past.

Party in the Blitz includes work that comes together through a material and social analysis of our contemporary society. Like the authors of science-fiction, the artists imagine future archeologies - unresolved social wounds of the past bubble into the present. The exhibition is imbued with the aesthetics of the retro-future, the archeological or historical subject of the present day, as well as pictures of mob-psychology and fractured community. The title refers both to the impending atrocities of one century ago as well as the human search for survival in a broken world by finding joy amid agony, and beauty in the rubble.

Text by Àngels Miralda