Gabriel Kuri
14 Oct - 22 Nov 2008
GABRIEL KURI
For his first solo show in London and with Sadie Coles HQ, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri presents Model for a Victory Parade. The title piece for the show comprises a simple conveyor belt with a squashed energy drink can stuck at one end, perpetually tumbling like an accidental metronome. This debris of an imagined ceremony, while holding multiple connotations, offers a material emphasis on the politics of energy consumption - a theme that runs current throughout the show. Whatever the impetus for the parade, whatever the regime or prevailing power for which it stands, Kuri presents a vision of what will inevitably be left behind. If history tells us the way things were supposed to have been, then as Stephen Dubner’s and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics proposed, “morality... represents the way people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually does work”. Drawing on this ambiguity within historical narratives, Kuri emphasises how hollow the pomp and circumstance of ceremony are when compared to its discarded remains: “believe not in the monument, believe in the drink cans littering them”.
For his first solo show in London and with Sadie Coles HQ, Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri presents Model for a Victory Parade. The title piece for the show comprises a simple conveyor belt with a squashed energy drink can stuck at one end, perpetually tumbling like an accidental metronome. This debris of an imagined ceremony, while holding multiple connotations, offers a material emphasis on the politics of energy consumption - a theme that runs current throughout the show. Whatever the impetus for the parade, whatever the regime or prevailing power for which it stands, Kuri presents a vision of what will inevitably be left behind. If history tells us the way things were supposed to have been, then as Stephen Dubner’s and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics proposed, “morality... represents the way people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents how it actually does work”. Drawing on this ambiguity within historical narratives, Kuri emphasises how hollow the pomp and circumstance of ceremony are when compared to its discarded remains: “believe not in the monument, believe in the drink cans littering them”.