Simon Denny. Products for Organising

About

The first solo show of Denny's work in London is being developed in response to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery and will feature new installations that revolve around contemporary radical management practices and the historical hacker organisational forms that may have inspired them.

Denny is one of the leading figures of a generation of artists who employ content from the tech industry, the language of advertising and the aesthetics and ideologies of corporations or governmental bodies to scrutinise technology's role in shaping global culture. With the precision of an investigative journalist, Denny’s complex and layered installations explore the commodification of information, branding and marketing strategies, as well as the relationship between private and public industries. His work challenges numerous themes which are rooted in modern society’s globalised cultures of technology, consumerism, organisation and information control and dissemination.

Through two large-scale installations, which will divide the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, Denny looks at technological organisational models in both hacker circles and commercial companies. Hacker culture and tactics are addressed through an adaptation of a work realised in collaboration with architect Alessandro Bava. Made of scaffolding and featuring a constructed path, visitors are invited to experience and walk through this structure and encounter a number of sculptures, models and vitrines developed by Denny with artist/researcher Matt Goerzen and artist/brand consultant Emily Segal. Each of the vitrines presents a social narrative on the organisational history of hacking through gathered archival material.

Opposite this, in the other half of the Gallery, Denny will use the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – one of the three UK agencies that form the country’s security and intelligence system – and commercial tech companies like Zappos and Apple as case studies encapsulated within a new series of sculptural models. These works investigate the ways in which organisations mirror their respective working models with their building’s architecture and use of physical space. Throughout the exhibition, organisational tools emerge as common threads, and connections between the disparate yet similar ways that groups of people gather around technology.

The Serpentine’s winter exhibitions will focus on the role technology plays in contemporary life. Running concurrently at the Serpentine Gallery will be an exhibition of works by Michael Craig-Martin.  His show will feature recent drawings and paintings of objects that utilise digital technologies, including new pieces that have been conceived especially for the exhibition.