We’re living in extraordinary times: a global pandemic and radical social justice movements have laid bare systemic inequalities in care, power and class. We’ve been unveiled and now is the time to interrogate how we position ourselves, and others, in the world. Artists are often cultural lighthouses that instantiate societal undercurrents and shifts. The artists here probe two social attitudes that have transpired: lifestyle minimalism and wellness culture. Highly polished, bourgeois, they seem so succinctly out of step with our times. Through a postcolonial lens, political acumen and humor, the artists dissect these trends to proffer a different kind of social contract.
Amie Siegel traces the ownership history of chairs designed by Pierre Jeanneret from their present-day decoration for affluent owners back to the government buildings in India for which they were made. These spoils of modern design emblematise how objects are imbued with value and underscore differences in culture and use. Presenting a coded narrative of empire and colonialism as told through modernism, art history, ethnography, Stephanie Syjuco undermines the idea of cultural and political neutrality. Nathan Mabry explores the tension between identity and authorship, the authentic and the counterfeit, creating sculptures with an ethnographical pastiche that interrogate the works of his own making. Ana Navas’s accumulation of forms are in response to cultural appropriation and transformation, while Eduardo Sarabia explodes material culture in a book that spoofs the layout and function of a mail-order catalogue.
Mimicking aspirational-media formats, Ilana Harris-Babou addresses the relation between class, race and authenticity; Shana Moulton challenges those aspirations through feminist spirituality and the wellness industry. In a parody of colonial exploration, Alberto Baraya archives plants that are endowed by the wellness industry as essential ingredients in self-care and alternative medicines.