ART/London
“DaDaDa: Strategies Against Marketecture”
Oct. 22-Nov. 21

This exhibition explores the visual aesthetics of resistance. Taking in work that mixes up art, music and design, artists from the US, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Finland and the UK, the program provides a critical and often playful opposition to super-hyped consumer culture.

Curator statement: “Strategien Gegen Architekturen” (Vols. I,II,III) is a series of three compilations documenting the music of German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, famed for their attempts to conquer the repressed rebuilt surfaces of postwar Berlin by beating on the physical structures of the city and using them as instruments.

Far from suggesting that the buildings should be destroyed, they attempted to release the cacophony they perceived to be trapped within the static forms.

As for marketecture, nobody’s quite sure what that is. The Internet’s Word Spy dictionary has that it is:

marketecture (mar.kuh.TEK.chur) n. 1. A new computer architecture that is
being marketed aggressively despite the fact that it doesn't yet exist as a
finished product.

To us, however, it is like Einstürzende Neubauten’s city; a hyperdefined space that needs to be conquered. We are surrounded by mass-mediated consumer culture, which we seek not to destroy but to make our own.

The exhibition features artists, writers and musicians, who each position themselves in relation to this great living/dead cityscape. Some find ready made objects, sounds and ideas in the debris, using them against the grain, to reveal a truer nature.

Others add pixel to pixel or frame to frame, to explore the beauty seen only through the eye of the machine. Some see spaceships in tea cups, insects in shopping carts, pagans in Tesco, erotic eruptions in videogame consoles and wonderful weird druid songs in polyphonic ring tones. Others dance to a different tune, recorded on makeshift instruments in a bedroom all their own. This is democracy with an eye for d.i.y., and you’re welcome to make your own.

Shown: Montage (left to right)/Works by: Mister Ministeck, Chicks on Speed, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, ROR (Revolutions on Request)

Find it: temporarycontemporary
2nd Floor, Atlantic House
The Old Seager Distillery
Brookmill Road / Deptford Bridge
London SE8 4JT
Get info: + 07766 130 860

Find other art events worldwide, in the OCT/NOV issue of "Arte Six".