KARST | Lament of Ur | 10
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Lament of Ur

Joey Holder / Viktor Timofeev

18 Nov – 12 Dec 2015

(Archived)

Environmental Metagenomics, Ecological Paralysis Self-monitoring, Self-sensing, Self-determinism, Self-defense.

The complexity of their differences called to question the current assumption that they evolved from a similar point of origin. There was suspicion that something else was at work, which involved a highly specialized and self-assembled alchemy.

Timescales were largely irrelevant anyway, as there was no linear travel through space around the surface of a planet; they could essentially balance on the gravitational field and ride it like a wave.

The more they travelled, the more advanced they became, dynamically shape-shifting and continually self-propelling themselves through space. All that was left was a set of arithmetic patterns and traces of an ideographic language.

Lament of Ur is an exhibition by Joey Holder and Viktor Timofeev inspired by themes of entrapment, conspiracy theories and speculation on post-human life, among others. The exhibition includes a video, an interactive computer game, fabricated and found sculptures, prints and mural paintings. Holder and Timofeev’s work weaves together, eschewing the standard “duo show” division into individual practices, in favour of a synergetic in-house collaboration that brings together both artists’ works without emphasising their individual authorship, allowing the works to be re-contextualised and “ebb and flow” into one another.

Proxyah, a computer game installed together with a sculptural controller, floor-print and zine-like instructional guide, deliberately obfuscates the premise of goal-oriented gameplay, a concept mirrored by Holder’s film, in which fictional and scientific lexicons are collaged together in order to speculate on the nature of language, levels of abstraction and a time without humans. The golden spot-light wall-prints surrounding a floor to ceiling JPEG of a Cuneiform tablet refer to the name of the exhibition itself; specifically to the popular theory of the Annunaki, the gold-mining alien race that enslaved the human race and is believed to have centred around the city of Ur of the Sumerian Civilisation. The exhibition softly suggests the parallel between this speculative theory and our current technocratic state – and reflects on our collective innate tendency to be controlled, to invent new gods to replace old ones, and to march blindly towards inevitable oblivion.