Process Matters

About

Process Matters exhibition will present the work of several international artists. The question that lies behind this exhibition regards our general lack of awareness regarding the nature of the products we consume and deal with on a daily basis and the sort of unconscious relations we establish with such products. More specifically, this exhibition seeks to reflect on how little we know about ‘processes of production' and the fact that we have become mere recipients of goods and commodities. In a society of consumers, attention is focused solely on the end product and the immediate fulfilment of need. This need, however, has developed itself to a more sophisticated one; it seems to happen that sometimes consumers, instead of responding to a real need (to be satisfied), are in fact driven just by a need of possess. This need for possession responds, to a certain extend, to an aura, an immateriality, that emanates from certain products. As a result, this exhibition is also concerned by the ‘supreme' status of the end product and its implications. A huge contradiction lies at the heart of this situation. A society that bases its wealth on the extraction and manipulation of natural resources for the production of goods and commodities is, at the same time, in a miserable state of ignorance regarding how these processes work. This situation can be understood in the context of consumer behaviour and the physical displacement of centres of production. As a result, and in order to invert this dichotomy, this exhibition aims to place its interest in the process rather than the final artwork itself. We are willing to present artists that in one way or another reflect on ‘processes', that their work is derived from/refers to a specific process. In short, the processes from which the artworks emerge are as important (and genuine) as the final piece. This exhibition seeks also to question the ‘supreme' role of the end product. As if consumers were outshined by a certain aura, it often happens that some purchases are driven by a sort of idealisation of products forgetting about the real purposefulness of said purchase, let alone the implications of its production. This object of desire, if seen from an analytic perspective, it is nothing else but an abstracted idea of the perpetual search of happiness and fulfilment through the material world. Some of the works presented question this aura through exposing other basic contradictions such as the ‘building in obsolescence strategies' and the unsustainability of a system that provokes cyclic social, health and environmental crisis. The exhibition includes the works of Fabia Claris, Paul Matosic, Sadie Murdoch, Pablo A Padilla Jargstorf, James Wood and Mary Yacoob.