Alex Bag, Jacky Connolly, Madeleine Hines, Becket MWN
GDL525, April 25. – May 11. 2025
Elfriede Jeliniek’s characters are doomed, they learn nothing — stuck in their illusions, their stories are scripted monotonous crescendos of selfish worlds where possessions are essentialized in forms and relations – environmental signifiers repeating until desensitization. GREED, the titular novel of the exhibition, follows a country policeman in small-town Austria, exploiting his position of authority to seduce and manipulate weaker and lonely others. His interactions are patriarchal and neoliberal standards, calculated attempts to acquire assets through relationships. The works showcased in the exhibition present a series of interior complexes, dystopias, portraits, manipulations of the everyday. Staged in the fish section of an air-conditioned mall, in picaresque drifts through a burning city, under the soles of used luxury shoe or in series of mediatized impersonations, the works of Becket MWN, Jacky Connolly, Madeleine Hines and Alex Bag, respectively, position characters in the neuroticism of consumerist culture, occupying mediatized forms and situations. They investigate the dematerialization of products into identities and the commodification and disappearance of the self within larger media, spiritual, and economic systems of exchange, power and control.
https://gdl525.com/greed-1
https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/greed-at-gdl525-amsterdam-55728