The Archivist Augurs, the Larper DreamsSquare Street Gallery
Square Street Gallery is pleased to present The Archivist Augurs, the Larper Dreams—a group exhibition which creates a dialogue between works by Dony Cheng, Dave Chow, These Faces (a.k.a. Jennifer Yeung), and Brandon Tay. The title of the exhibition borrows from Tay’s 2024 video work Emulator, which will also be included in the show. By working with Hong Kong philosopher Yuk Hui’s essay “For a Planetary Thinking” (2020), the exhibition brings together a group of artists engaged with a skeptical framework as they question the prescriptive paradigms with which we approach technology and its relationship to the material world.
Since the industrial revolution, and the ensuing globalization, our relationship with technology follows a particular logos; a machine completes a task it was produced to complete. Drawing upon what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Gestell or “enframing,” Hui argues that this logos closes off the possibility of technology, and thus fits within the model of accelerationist development that has been decided and laid out for us. He suggests instead that the challenge to such models can be found in artmaking, wherein the enframing of the same technology used to facilitate the flow of capital breaks its relationship with instrumentalisation, opening it up to risk and alterity. This exhibition thinks through this approach to technology through the works of four artists.