As the COVID-19 pandemic is calling for a complete re-thinking of the established order in all industries, the new decade has taken a unexpected turn, rendering our latest L'OFFICIEL Art issue with a newfound perspective.
How did we end a decade? What is on the horizon for the next ten years? This season, The Warning Issue looks back at the alerts that littered the past decade and their ability to bring out new forms, stories, and metaphors. For this, five artistic projects punctuate these pages as bursts, protrusions in an accelerated time, if not direct responses to contemporary jolts. The overload of information with which we are newly confronted, in fact, modifies our relationship with words and images. - Focus, scrolling, cut and recut, copy-paste - practices that participate in a form of attention bursting as much as they involve methods of poetic reconstruction, reversing the predictive logics imposed by algorithms.
Oral or written data, bloated and unexpected, activating by spam and notifications, are reshaped in slogans and language explosions as in Nora Turato’s work. The networks that increase us, embellish us, and complete us through filters and masks potentially give us access to multiplicity, to new alterities as with the queer collective of Shanghai NVSHU. With Black Quantum Futurism, identities deviate from historical determinisms to reinvent the representations and temporalities of tomorrow. The real is virtualized and vice versa. The great crises become archives thanks to The Opioid Crisis Lookbook where the new great North American depression is seen from the angle of a nightmare soap-opera. Finally, the decade is a recipe for disaster. This is what Chris Korda already told us with his alarming happenings: Save the planet, Kill Yourself. His motto, between deep-ecology and Dadaism, finds a new sagacity today.
The Warning Issue is also the opportunity to see these five projects come to life in the form of a public exhibition. Slogans, provocative injunctions, unreal advertisements, horrifying posters, forward-looking programs, will all be displayed in Paris for the publication of this issue. How to end a decade? What horizon for the next ten years? These proposals are replicas of the agitations of time. They act like fires restoring by haloes, the contradictory excitement of the world, without being known if they serve as a guide or a route.
Purchase the new L'OFFICIEL Art issue here.
