Would You Share Your Gold Medal? Exhibition at School of Visual Arts New York
Elias Wessel
The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Would you share your gold medal? an exhibition curated by Oorja Garg including the artists Aman Kapoor, Cybermohalla Live, Dmstfctn, Elias Wessel, Merve Ertufan & Johanna Adebäck. Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 1, 2023, 6:00–8:00 PM; Opening hours: November 1–November 8, 2023; MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, 132 West 21st St, Floor 10, New York, NY.
The exhibition delves into the cutthroat world of the free-market rat wheel, revealing the omnipresence of neoliberalist capitalism triggered with every touch of a screen or press of a button. It personifies the constant tug of war, subverting the tension and anxiety between human interpersonal and human-machine relationships, transactions, and negotiations through the rendering of game-scapes.
The performative duopolies and play molded by the artists and game designers emulsify and merge games and versions of reality to create a dialogical space with infinite possibilities. This interstitial space between victory and defeat, occupied by the desire to compete and survive, is the driving force of any zero-sum transaction. The artworks operate within game-like conditions to entice the spirit of competition in the players, only to lead them into an inconclusive state of contemplation.
Aman Kapoor re-imagines the classic Bandai Namco's Pac-Man as a quadruply, instigating complex interpersonal dynamics among the players. Cybermohalla Live performs a dialogical battle of questions, much like the game of chess, subverting the structure of zero-sum interactions. Dmstfctn’s Godmode Epochs is a multiplayer AI training clicker game, in which players race against time to train an AI in identifying products lined on shelves in an infinite, simulated supermarket—can you collect 512 items? Elias Wessel’s Space Invaders mirrors the politics of the game developed during the Cold War and the algorithms of surveillance capitalism in the present. Merve Ertufan & Johanna Adebäck experiment with psychological dynamics of interpersonal communication, where the games of Tug of War and Compliments turn into a competitive, aggressive play between them.
Would you share your gold medal? is a deliberation on the existential challenges posed by the supposed win-lose binary in the contemporary economic and political landscape, transforming it into a gamified experience.