FRONT GALLERY: Mia Van den bos (sa) - cast no shadow

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 3rd May

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Running - 4th May - 20th May 2017

Cast no shadow presents a new body of work from Mia van den Bos that emerges from one material premise: the screenshot. Some days we ski elegantly across the surface of our endlessly updating feeds, other days it feels like we’re drowning. A screenshot is an act of halting, grasping, recording and savouring. A floodgate snapping shut on a forceful, unrelenting rush of water. The exhibition expands on Van den Bos’ recent research in which she learned computer programming skills to equip herself to creatively critique patterns of surveillance, ownership and exploitation within corporate social media. Cast no shadow extends the artist’s thesis to consider community and self-surveillance as a behavioural simulation of the social relations coerced within omnipresent Silicon Valley devices and platforms. The screenshot is a versatile medium which facilitates communal hate-lurking and the storing of social ‘receipts’, the dispersal of memes, products and unconsenting nudes and the sharing of private conversations. They sustain a late capitalist Neighbourhood Watch for the protection of social status. Along with these considerations the works in Cast no shadow maintain a fascination with the screenshot as a medium, the product of an often inexplicable punctum that compels us to simultaneously hold down the front and side button of our iPhones. Yet these artefacts soon become the forgotten digital detritus that clog up our phone and computer hard drives. Who frames a screenshot?

Photography by Steph Fuller