Following the study of production that defines this year’s edition of LOOP Barcelona, the exhibition presents the works of eleven artists who research the body and subjectivity as entities that produce and are produced. The selected works play with and analyse virtual worlds, video games, dating apps, ASMR and Google Images as spheres of interaction, surveillance and intimacy. In our unstable context, where neoliberal globalisation is being surpassed by authoritarian drifts, and technological acceleration, artificial intelligence and climate change are questioning humans’ position in the world; bodies and subjects appear as battle fields of commercial and political signification. Today, bodies go beyond their somatic limits into the deep web as users of drugs and sex slaves, while subjects are not defined by lineal accumulative narratives, but rather by superimposed layers of stimuli and boredom, networks of reciprocity that encourage and reward the individual’s originality and performativity, as instances of an extended system of self-exploitation and precariousness, present in work conditions and personal relations. These processes are physical and visual, we are traceable yet anonymous, specific yet pre-determined, while our fingers swipe and scroll screens that turn our personalities into mixers of hyperlinks to endless content. The artistic projects presented here reflect a multiplicity of approaches that are research-based while concerned with the senses. They connect to larger inquiries on materiality and bodily fluids, and they critically look at the Internet as an infinite space of interconnectivity. If we were to group them all under a word, production would come back to mind, understood as an ongoing process that evidences how we are inconclusive products of an unclear time.
With the collaboration of Hangar