Riche, Stora Matsalen, Stockholm
April 25 - June 24, 2023
Artists: Camila Manuelsdotter Pino, Chih-Lin Yeh, Vincent Haynes, Harry Woodrow, Helén Svensson, Nicole Walker and Sofia Runarsdotter
Curated by Ashik Zaman
Harry Woodrow, Here Come the Warm Jets 02, 2022. (Blue)
For this exhibition concept I was very inspired by what has been an all-time favourite artwork of mine by the “collective artist” (not artist collective) or pseudo artist Claire Fontaine consisting of a red brick wrapped with a rubber band in the book cover of Guy Debord’s ”The Society of the Spectacle” and that very notion of ”the society of spectacle”.
That was a point of departure and brief with each of the artists, many of whom have been making brand new works for the exhibition in dialogue with me. The title which is actually extracted from “catfishing” on a meetup online site is not quite a jab at Riche per se as an establishment, but there are indeed elements of site-specificity and a lot of play, perhaps not so much with what Riche factually is but what it could be seen to represent as a site for the posturing and pageantry that runs in line with the modus of contemporary urban life.
This exhibition is hoped to be a comic relief and humour is a driver of it. In fact one of the artworks you’ll be seeing originates from a conversation during last Thanksgiving about how going out at night in New York just isn’t fun anymore. Not like in Madrid where people actually want to still have fun. In New York in contrast, it’s all about posturing, said a friend over in the Us of A. Me and one of the artists in the exhibition had a laugh about it at my recent birthday, declaring that we might be getting older, but fuck, that’s so true also in relation to Stockholm.
Ashik Zaman
Sofia Runarsdotter, Kalkylen, 2022, lenticular photographic print, detail view
Camila Manuelsdotter Pino, Manifest/The inner rally – You either hear your own voice, a friend’s, your parents or the abuelos, series of 10 placards; I am not your telenovela, 2023