Phrases like ‘post-human’ and other cool-sounding terms get bandied about a lot in ‘Looks’, a group exhibition about how new technologies reshape our appearances and identities. But if you’re expecting any deep insights or cogent analysis, then this isn’t really the show for you. Instead, and possibly quite appropriately given its subject matter, it feels like a rather rushed and chaotic affair, more concerned with the superficial lustre of things – the slippery surfaces of contemporary culture.
There are several good, if rather unnerving works. Juliette Bonneviot’s slick and shiny ‘Xenoestrogens’ are a nice twist on the tradition of monochrome painting, her chemical colours stemming from the hormone-altering substances commonly found in consumer goods and foods. On a similar behavioural theme, Andrea Crespo’s video is a suitably fractured exploration of psychiatric disorders, in which medical phrases and graphics scroll and disappear faster than you’re able to properly register them. A more whimsical note, meanwhile, is struck by Stewart Uoo, who reproduces a women’s magazine ‘true confessions’ page in the form of a large carpet. Unfortunately his adjacent cyborg-mutant mannequins, with their fashionably distressed clothes and apocalyptically flayed skins, feel slightly too trite.
There’s a similar problem with the biggest piece in the show: a lengthy, twin-screen film installation by Wu Tsang. Set in a kind of cyberpunk demimonde, the story depicts a day in the life of a fearsome-looking nightclub dancer/celebrity, whose performances – with her muscled physique, shaved head, and otherworldly tattoos – are absolutely extraordinary to watch. The background story, on the other hand – involving dystopian regimes and drugs that characters access through media devices – is total nonsense, not to mention deeply derivative. This is one piece that would have been better without the attempts at deep insight, and left as a work of pure, visual spectacle.
Gabriel Coxhead