| Adddiction (curatorial project) with Chris Kul-Want |
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21 June - 27 July 2003 Micawber St London
PRESS RELEASE PRIVATE VIEW FRIDAY June 20th 2003 Addiction, supposedly more prevalent than ever, can migrate into any activity exceeding the laws that govern enjoyment. Not only defined by drug or substance abuse, everything is potentially classifiable as addictive: sex, work, eating and weight control, play, shopping, exercise, relationships, the TV or its latest incarnation, the internet. This endemic aspect to the recent spate of addictive disorders is revealing both about the irreducibility and persistence of pleasure, and the restraint of law. The works in this exhibition are all about pleasure, yet not as we know it. Instead they are characterised by a sense of disengagement, paralysis or dumbness, interspersed with ecstatic or confused outbursts. Restraint and control, manifested in self-sufficient systems or closed circuits is, itself, the pleasure. The works seem to utilise language in a way that comes before speech, yet they also take the form of a hidden or coded message, a surplus, operating somewhere between a private activity and a public declaration. This ambiguity of address is framed by the location of the exhibition -a vacant office space in central London. The purpose of this exhibition is to suspend judgment about addiction as culturally problematic; so as to explore the idea of art, and the making and practice of art, as a necessary disorder. Selected works by artists Alan Ball, Cerith Wyn Evans, Margarita Gluzberg, Mathew Hale, Thomas Locher, Robert Mabb, Susan Morris, Anna Mossman and Julian Opie.
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