The exhibition explores the foundational relationship between modernity and demise on conceptual and materials ranges. The ICA’s important gallery options Abattoir, U.S.A.!, a site-specific movie set up with immersive 8-channel sound. The animated movie traverses the inside of an empty slaughterhouse. Rendered utilizing the 3D laptop graphics software, Unreal Engine, the movie weaves the viewer via corridors and chambers, an imaginary patchwork of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty first century architectures. The movie is mimicked within the ICA’s gallery via bodily echoes of the digital house. Composer Evan Zierk’s accompanying rating samples area recordings, cinematic instrumentals, algorithmically generated sound, in addition to a well-known pop cowl. A brand new object-based work can be offered alongside Abattoir, U.S.A.! within the adjoining gallery.

As an artist and author, Dean is invested in a theoretical critique of representational programs, analysing how aesthetic concept, picture networks and visibility map onto questions of race and energy. The works on view proceed Dean’s curiosity in addressing Blackness when it comes to aesthetics in a manner that doesn’t depend upon cultural signifiers and lived expertise, however moderately positions Blackness as a structural power and structural object. Abattoir, U.S.A.! is a response to 2 tandem questions that intersect idea and type: on the one hand, the literal and allegorical topic of the slaughterhouse as a specific collision of industrialisation, human and non-human actors, structure, and demise; and however, a response to structural movie.

Conceptually the work started by way of Dean’s sustained engagement with the writing of French thinker Georges Bataille, particularly his point out of the slaughterhouse as a website that should essentially sit outdoors of what we deem “civil society” to uphold the boundary and performance of that society. We actually
and conceptually situate animal slaughter on the outskirts. As we transfer into 2024, the topic of Dean’s exhibition looms giant. In opposition to a up to date backdrop of systemic violence and subjugation, the analogy of the slaughterhouse accommodates the query of structuralised demise as a cornerstone of contemporary life. The exhibition deliberates on vital features of cinema and the origins of modernist architectures—subjects long-debated inside these partitions—and places them in dialog with histories of industrialisation, anti-Blackness, fascism, and colonialism that demand pressing consideration. Right here on the ICA, located on The Mall within the seat of the institution, Dean locations what has been pushed to the outskirts squarely at centre.

Aria Dean, Artist, says:

“It’s a protracted and convoluted story of lethal modernity whose chapters’ order hardly issues. Extra essential is the room tone earlier than the loop restarts itself. Bloody interstices make teachable classes, the place photographs can solely make little poems of igneous histories.”

Bengi Ünsal, ICA Director, says:

“I can not consider a extra thrilling exhibition to inaugurate our newly reopened and renovated areas. Dean’s work represents a singular pressure of interdisciplinary pondering that recognises the connections
and influences between photographs, sound, structure, and philosophy, and applies this pondering in the direction of vital investigation of the character of subjectivity in our time. Her perspective, and particularly ‘Abattoir,’ couldn’t be extra well timed.”

at ICA London
till Might 5, 2024