IAF – Gallery Booth – Press Release 2019

In keeping with our commitment to cutting-edge and critical artistic practices, Shrine empire brings to its audience a curated booth exploring the idea of ‘slowness’ through a range of exciting new commissions. Speed was the ultimate promise of modernity — with its fetish for anarchic newness while gesturing towards a singular temporality that cannot comprehend non-western histories, indigenous wisdom or ecological backlash. Arguably, rather than concur with the slow pace of Darwinian evolutionary rhythm, impatient progress has cumulatively steeped us in the excesses of technophilic developmental models, rapidly amplifying inequities of capital, and estrangement from sensuality. These blind spots in the dominant narrative of Modernism is perhaps most emphatically revealed in Marinetti’s Furturist Manifesto where valorization of speed is concurrent with the glorification of war and contempt for women — antithetical to politics widely nurtured by contemporary art. How can we formulate a vocabulary of resistance that is aware of heterogeneous post-colonial time, polyphonic spaces and departures from the libidinal post-industrial patterns of consumption? Critiquing modernity would entail a critique of the vocabulary of speed. This exhibition proposes to refract chronological time to reveal the eternities it conceals — to slow down and immerse in luminal spaces, sensorial anomalies, and incommensurable stories.

‘Slow’ is a message in a bottle tossed into the open sea, subject to non-calibrated currents, the steep crescendo of hurricanes and the gravitational pull of the moon. It is attuned to the rhythms of nature, contra-modernities, and a flux of differential phenomena including compassion for the triumphs and detritus of modernity. ‘Slow’, is a sensorial engagement with the modern ethical and ecological problems offered by speed, that is more telling about language, perception and connectedness than the rapidity of a text message in a hyper-networked universe that is defiantly nostalgic of historical err. ‘Slow’ is a sensibility, always relational, in the state of becoming and contrapuntal to the finality of propaganda.

Download curatorial essay