‘Even garbage is alluring because it informs us of human systems. Think how quickly something monkish becomes pornographic by association.’

English artist Helen Marten uses an internal, cryptic logic to unpick the binary relationship between question and answer. She then wads it with simulacra, showing the riddled possibilities of the endless associations between A and B, or even C and D and E. Ordinarily, she has done this through her sculptural and installation works. Through The Boiled in Between, however, Marten’s first work of fiction, the artist enmeshes her chaotic depictions of humanity into an abstract wordscape that floats and falls and gushes with observational intensity. With Modern Matter, the artist discusses this new extension of her practice, presented here alongside artworks inspired by the book, and an extract from the book itself.

Alexander Dixon’s work is capricious. It centres on the meeting place between the artificial and the natural, purposefully displacing the viewer by intersecting environmental planes to create new contextual confinements. In doing so, it allows for multiple spatial and temporal moments to converge, captured in photographs, and then conjoined beyond recognition and laid out on construction metals. According to cultural theorists Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund, this merging of space and time, in relation to the conception of art, acts as a cultural carrier in creating transnational spaces that thematise, represent and become themselves ‘an object of experience.’ This multiplicity of experiential components transgresses the boundaries of rationale, and allows for the emergence of new perspectives, often using the tool of disruption.

The theory goes that when we look at something, we are presented with a message, or ‘signified,’ in the form of a ‘signifier,’ being any image or object – or anything else – that can carry meaning. As underlined by contemporary Canadian artist Shaan Syed, not everyone receives these images in the same way. In other words, we all see differently, and what we do see is massively influenced by context and identity. From 4th July–15th August 2020, Freehouse will once again be open to the public, making its post-lockdown debut with an exhibition titled ‘Thank you India, Goodbye Pakistan, Hello England.’ The show will feature three works by Syed, composed of deconstructed images of the spiral minaret staircase at the Great Mosque of Samarra, Iraq. Across these paintings, and his wider body of work, the artist explores the politics of seeing.

When a hyperlink is clicked, it triggers an on-screen redirection toward a stated Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. This action, though minuscule and often disregarded, is significant in its symbolism of virtuality, and of what virtual curating can offer us. These worlds do not exist in the present, and they are not physically reachable spaces. Instead, they can be found in a life-world that is dissimilar to our own, by switching on an electronic device, connecting to the internet, and allowing a coded set of events to take us on a journey through an art space.