Battersea Park Pump House Gallery Presents...
Time Crystals by David Panos
Above: David Panos' Fast Fashion (courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens gallery)
The Pump House Gallery is presenting an exhibition of recent work by artist David Panos from October 4th - December 17. Based on ongoing research into the relation between cultural form, history and memory, the presentation examines the contemporary revisiting of motifs from the 1980s and 1990s, in particular from the ‘alternative’ and ‘rave’ subcultures.
Through the lens of the artist’s personal recollections of the period around 1989 (dubbed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama at the time as ‘The End of History’) the exhibition looks at the ways that fashion, dance and gestures have anticipated and reflected macro political and social change, but also hold and transmit shifting meanings across cycles of revival. The work reflects on how twenty-first century digital media, industrialised ‘fast’ fashion and the deepening penetration of institutions into popular cultural histories transform how we might interpret and remember the past.
Bringing together a number of videos and installation elements placed in disruptive relation - ‘authentic’ archival material and digital compositing, choreography and online searches, contemporary club footage and abstract animations - Panos contrasts and collides different registers in a series of inversions that both extend and undermine his own memory and open up the horizon of a different future.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of discussions, performances and activities designed in dialogue with the artist. On Saturday 21st October Misters of Circe and Josh GT will perform live music preceded by a panel discussion on subcultural music movements from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Further dates will be announced here. Booking essential.
September 11, 2017