Event detail
In celebration of the decline of European civilisation and the resolute march into ignorance, violence and oblivion, Ultra Cave proposes a future in which the remnants of civilisation are assembled in the various forms and modalities theeternally-pending apocalypse permits. Moments of transcendence remain possible on a planet stripped of even the most rudimentary trappings of modern social and structural relations.
Opening July 1 6-9pm
Closing July 7 6-9pm
Irene Pérez-Hernández work addresses modalities of structure relative to exhaustion in her work “Fulfil the Gaps”. In the piece, a more-or-less willing victim engages in a series of physical exertions in the radically circumscribed gallery environment. Ambivalence is the licensing agreement imposed by modern political and social interaction; in “Fulfil the Gaps” it is possible to see terms of service in extensive detail.
Paul Desborough reimagines the dynamic of painting and photography by distilling the iconography of magazine photography and advertising in a new modality which he refers to as “cave photography”. “Not,” he specifies, “a return to the cave, but an interpretation of how modern civilisation can be marked—‘sumated’ somehow—using modern processes.”
JörgObergfell’s sculpture “High Rise Bunting” reduces the world’s tallest buildings to 1/1400th of their actual scale. These business stalactites droop from the Ultra Cave’s ceiling to memorialise and undermine the external, anthropogenic environment. From deep in the Ultra Cave, it is possible to see these reversed totems of economic transcendence as accretionary formations of the ephemera of contemporary human endeavour: wedges of debt, of capital, and of material. The economics of the architectural “race to the top” are literally turned upside down.
