Comprising three video installations and a new series of photographs, David Blandy’s third exhibition at Seventeen focuses on the artist’s relationship to technology and memory, speculation about Armageddon and a loss of connection to the server.
The installation The End of the World (2017) is a three-screen video projection enclosing the viewer in a planetarium style view of the solar system. The accompanying audio monologue intertwines examples of end times, examining its different cultural forms.
A new series of photographic works follow in the next room. Within each of the trio of collages a lattice of images have been interwoven, to form the outline of a star. Microchips, crystals, nebulae and rock formations are stretched and distorted into the form.
The Archive (2017) is a video made inside the Hans Tasiemka Archive, using 360-degree filming technology. This sprawling resource is run by 94-year-old Edda Tasiemka from a 1920s semi-detached house in Golders Green, London. Amassed over decades, the collection holds hundreds of thousands of idiosyncratically catalogued newspaper cuttings forming a web of interconnected stories and information.
HD Lifestyle (2017) focuses on the physical nature of the screen, its component elements and the cost of their extraction. Blandy notes the physicality of the Cloud, the ocean floor cables and rare earth minerals that are extracted at such an environmental cost that the Chinese state has designated specific ‘sacrificial zones’ – concentrated toxic wastelands permitted in order to maintain high levels of production.
| Duration | 03 November 2017 - 16 December 2017 |
| Times | Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm and by appointment |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Seventeen |
| Address | 17 Kingsland Rd, London, E2 8AA |
| Contact | 020 7729 5777 / info@seventeengallery.com / www.seventeengallery.com |