Blood for Light

About

waterside contemporary is pleased to present Blood For Light, an exhibition by Nastivicious.

Blood For Light brings together a cycle of video installations in which fast-paced visuals and music are narrated in lucid and precise language by a voice that is at points poet, seducer, prophet, and agitator.
With experience in the broadcast industry, pop music and performance, Nastivicious (who describe themselves as a “productive unit committed to creating good work”) are proficient in manipulating and distributing ‘content’. An on-the-fly quality, broad references and stroboscopic attention spans are at once tools and subjects of interrogation.

In a high-energy karaoke, The Overture sets out terms under which the family of man battles with its conscience and instincts, it both denounces and pays tribute to human folly. In South, a collage of iconic moments of recent art history, the art world itself is an example of a failing solipsism: obsessed with commercial relevance and lacking penetrating engagement despite the appearance of complexity (just what precisely is a ‘global context’?).

Far from seeking shelter in pluralism, the artists reject the comfort of easy questions and tidy answers, and their irreverent disruption is in stark defiance to the well-meaning and earnest criticality that is failing to generate ideas adequate for here and now. “To survive, we have to move onto solid foods;” an explicit affirmation comes inFuck Identity, a set of enticements in the form of bodily fluids. This alluring invitation to foreground tangible experience highlights the redemptive potential of the most base of our instincts: blood and tears, love, joy, pleasure and beauty all roll together.

Nastivicious are Nástio Mosquito and Vic Pereiró who have collaborated in a variety of forms since 2010. Their recent exhibitions and performances include: METANEO, Espai d’art contemporani de Castello, 2016; Daily Lovemaking, Venice Biennale and Ikon Birmingham; Göteborg Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2015; …all silent but for the buzzing…, RCA London, 2014; 9 Artists, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2013.