Empty When Full

About

Taking Johanna Hedva’s GLUT as its starting point, Empty When Full combines the works of four artists invited to respond to the main themes that GLUT channels and explores.

‘The universe doesn’t care about our feelings,’ the AI voice of GLUT proclaims to its user. What can the AI - divined by Hedva - know of human experience? Of the universe? GLUT asks us to consider the possibility that AI is but a twenty-first century iteration of a primordial impulse, a desire to find meaning and instruction from a consciousness greater than our own.

The black hole at the heart of GLUT creates a paradoxical space for exploration of not just what we are, but why. The borders that separate the human from the nonhuman, digital from analogue, the truth from a lie, are constantly in flux and seem always contradictory. ‘Post-truth,’ ‘false prophets,’ ‘living with Covid,’ are the phrases and tropes that run through contemporary culture – descriptions of our times which are experienced most sharply from the margins, where our four artists reside.

Empty When Full can be thought of as an exhibition created along the event horizon of our information age. The four new works created by Jay Price, MH Sarkis, Li Yilei, and Keira Fox examine through images, objects, and stories the ways in which too much is never enough, whilst often what we need most is absent. The abundance of choice and acceleration of consumption create a multi-layered illusion constructed from packaging, marketing, and ever-shifting lines.

These four artists undertake an examination of who we are becoming that mirrors the sentiment of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, where the author begs the questions: ‘who knows? Who decides? Who decides who decides?’ The text implores the reader to consider the risks of buying into the mirages that lurk at the intersection of freedom and technology. Similarly, and like Hedva, the artists exhibited here place centre stage their own take on the processes which run our lives, exposing and illuminating them in turn.

By these means, and through experimenting with tools and formats, they help us glimpse the myths, desires, inversions, and fallacies formed within the black holes of power and data.

Designed explicitly for a digital environment, the works in this exhibition continue not only Hedva’s odyssey to disrupt the knowledge we take for granted, but further an inquiry into the confines of ‘art’ that GLUT so powerfully strikes out for.