Slow Drift(s): Peggy Ahwesh - Screening curated by Alcaeus Spyrou

SCREENING Slow Drift(s): Peggy Ahwesh - Intervened by filmmaker Alcaeus Spyrou

WITH FILMS BY Total Refusal, Suzanne Treister and Theo Triantafyllidis
Expanding the defined boundaries of the exhibition ‘Slow Drift(s): Peggy Ahwesh’ as a single event, The Balcony has invited filmmaker Alcaeus Spyrou to develop a screening program responding to Ahwesh’s selected works.
Alcaeus Spyrou’s proposal responds to Ahwesh’s formal deployment of video games, especially because of the way in which these may allow the audience to actively participate in the construction of meaning and narrative development. The works in this program trace the often invisible forces shaping the world, including military and commercial organizations, as well as the technology that sustains their functioning.
Alcaeus' selection includes Theo Triantafyllidis’ Ork Haus (2022), Total Refusal’s Hardly Working (2022), and Suzanne Treister’s HFT The Gardener (2015). The works expose the truly monstrous aspects of working from home and the technology that perpetuates it, the invisible forces that govern the world, including military, paranormal, or commercial organizations, as well as a certain view of how capitalism seems to have monopolized our lives.

PROGRAM

• Ork Haus (2022) — Theo Triandafilidis

‘Ork Haus’ is artist Theo Triantafyllidis’s response to this promise, a nightmarish vision of the metaverse in which the truly monstrous aspects of working from home and the technology that continues to enable us to do so are the subject of a work that is part live simulation, part experimental theatre, drawing as much from The Sims as it does from Lars Von Trier’s Dogville. “Whether we like it or not, being in the new media art scene you are very, very close to Silicon Valley culture,” asserts Triantafyllidis. “In some ways we are doomed as artists to be running behind whatever new platform Facebook decides to roll out. I’m trying to be critical of these technologies and expose both the nonsensicality and complete impracticality of some of these ideas. Being familiar with this technology for a few years now it was very transparent to me that a lot of the things that Mark Zuckerberg was presenting in the Meta presentation were very, very far from being realised, even with their resources.”

• Hardly Working (2022) — Total Refusal
In ‘Hardly Working’, therefore, we immediately notice a meticulous directorial work that offers us various shots of the characters from different perspectives. And through skilful editing we immediately become part of their world. A woman continuously sweeps the floor, always in the same spot. Her gaze is always directed downwards. The laundress, from time to time, looks up at the sky. She almost seems to dream of a better future that will never come. Meanwhile, an off-screen voice describes their gestures and their monotonous daily routine. What does society expect of us? Are we always considered as human beings or are we just extras in charge of running a machine that is much bigger than us? The Total Refusal collective has no doubt about this.
The message comes through loud and clear. And a deep pessimism immediately takes centre stage. Hardly Working fully accords with the canons and style of the collective’s works, and through an entirely original and subjective mise-en-scène it traces a sincere and sadly realistic fresco of the world in which we live. A world in which capitalism seems to have definitively monopolised our lives. Can things ever change? This, at the moment, we cannot know. Yet, denouncing this reality is already one step ahead.

• HFT The Gardener (2015) — Suzanne Treister
HFT The Gardener by Suzanne Treister is a large-scale project that comprises drawings and computer works by fictional character Hillel Fischer Traumberg. HFT is an algorithmic High-Frequency Trader based in London, who experiences a hallucinogenic episode that triggers a journey into the exploration of psychoactive plants. In a nerd-like discovery of Discovering Hebrew, numerology, botany, and shamanic divination and healing, HFT becomes an ‘outsider artist’ whose works are collected by oligarchs, bankers, and museums, much like in the mainstream art world.
In the 1980s, Suzanne Treister’s practice was concerned primarily with painting. Since the 1990s, Treister has been a pioneer in the practice of digital art and new media since. Her work explores new technologies and develops fictional worlds to create obscure collaborative international organisations. Her projects often require research and development over several years and can take different forms, including the internet as a medium and platform. The artist positions herself as an operator of fantastic reinterpretations of taxonomies and histories that have hidden existences, invisible forces that govern the world as well as military, paranormal or commercial organisations.

ABOUT Alcaeus Spyrou

Alcaeus Spyrou (b.1991) is a filmmaker who researches the creation of mythologies for our industrial landscapes. By documenting these superstructures of capital from their logistical abstraction into their metaphysical and spiritual dimensions, he renders visible the effects they have on the environment and the inhabitants that populate and work in these topographies. These cultural landscapes, which are understood as interrelated sites across an area, contain archaeological evidence of how factors of production are organised in depth of time, their geo-political implications, but more importantly, how they stand as a reflection of society’s moral heritage.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Balcony, 14 A-2 Nieuwe Molstraat, Den Haag, Netherlands