Aria Dean: Abattoir
The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London is home to Aria Dean: Abattoir, a solo exhibition of the New York-based interdisciplinary artist’s recent work, marking Dean’s first exhibition in the UK. The exhibition explores the foundational relationship between modernity and death on conceptual and material levels.
The ICA’s main gallery features film installation Abattoir, U.S.A.!. The animated film travels the interior of an empty slaughterhouse, weaving the viewer through corridors and chambers, mimicked in the ICA’s gallery through physical echoes of the virtual space. Dean says: “It’s a long and convoluted story of deadly modernity whose chapters’ order hardly matters. More important is the room tone before the loop restarts itself. Bloody interstices make teachable lessons, where images can only make little poems of igneous histories.”
As an artist and writer, Dean is invested in a theoretical critique of representational systems, analysing how aesthetic theory, image networks and visibility map onto questions of race and power. The displayed works continue Dean’s interest in addressing Blackness in terms of aesthetics in a way that doesn’t rely upon cultural signifiers and lived experience, but rather positions Blackness as a structural force and structural object.
Conceptually the work began via Dean’s sustained engagement with the writing of French philosopher Georges Bataille, specifically his mention of the slaughterhouse as a site that must necessarily sit outside of what we deem ‘civil society’ to uphold the boundary and function of that society. We literally and conceptually place animal slaughter on the outskirts. Against a contemporary backdrop of systemic violence and subjugation, the analogy of the slaughterhouse accommodates the question of structuralised death as a cornerstone of modern life. The exhibition deliberates on critical functions of cinema and the origins of modernist architectures – topics long-debated within these walls – and puts them in conversation with histories of industrialisation, anti-Blackness, fascism, and colonialism that demand urgent attention.
Bengi Ünsal, ICA Director, says: “I cannot think of a more exciting exhibition to inaugurate our newly reopened and renovated spaces. Dean’s work represents a unique strain of interdisciplinary thinking that recognises the connections and influences between images, sound, architecture, and philosophy, and applies this thinking towards critical investigation of the nature of subjectivity in our time. Her perspective, and specifically Abattoir, could not be more timely.”
Molly Matalon (Greene Naftali New York)
Aria Dean Abattoir - Credit: Rob Harris, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 4.jpg
Aria Dean: Abattoir is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London until 5th May.