The works in “Afterlife,” examine the transformative and transgressive potential of grief, loss and remembrance. Charged with craving, tenderness, and at occasions, agony, a number of works discover the lack of self-identity and the battle to regain coherent selfhood. Via narrative, storytelling and creativeness, these concepts are interwoven with themes of mortality (our personal and others), interconnectedness (or lack thereof), self-legibility and renewal. The giving and receiving of those accounts, opens up an archive of need and that means. For Jordan/Martin Hell, the method of sharing is akin to “digging demise’s uncanny perversities as if divulging them round a camp hearth upon earnest ears at nighttime.”
Different works discover hallucinogenic, surreal states which can be dislocating and catapult one into an alternate actuality that differs markedly from the world we often occupy. Love and loss are explored by way of temporality and tonality. There are ephemeral, serene photographs, crammed with gentle and fluidity, which can be solely very tenuously related to the true world and goal for a working-through of mourning for overcoming loss and restoration. They discover an imagined afterlife, with fantastical imageries of ghosts, communion with spirits, parallel worlds and dream worlds. In some works, otherworldly types and hues are melded with influences from animation, which, says Estefanía B Flores, goal to create “superficial worlds conveying an absurdist, surrealist high quality.”

Many works have a visceral nature, specializing in bodily metamorphosis and the corporeal. The processing of feelings is in comparison with the organic processes of digestion: gradual, elementary, and winding although the digestive organs.
The physique is spliced open to specific the tensions between interiority and exteriority. Anjuli Rathod says that the digestive tract specifically has fascinated her—“the gradual, ugly means of transformation, the cyclical processing of fabric serves as a metaphor for grief.” Among the works and writing within the present, additionally discover the demise intuition by means of concepts round intercourse, pleasure and deviant behaviour. In different sculptures, there’s an exploration of the not-yet-healed second that signifies profound change, examined by way of the transgressive potential of concepts associated to the fembot or gynoid—a technological extension or re-embodiment of selfhood and need. Within the e book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Our bodies, Subcultural Lives Jack Halberstam writes that as a substitute of indicating naturalness, the exaggerated femininity and sexuality of the gynoids, in truth parodies stereotypes.
The world thus created is from an escapist fantasy that permits momentary reprieve from actuality and has subversive potential.

Via a deconstruction of threshold moments between previous and future, the works within the present discover the transgressive potentials of grief, need, tenderness, friendship and bliss to open up pathways to radical transformation and resilience.

Taking part artists:
Estefanía B. Flores, Jordan/Martin Hell, Anjuli Rathod

at indigo+madder, London
till September 30, 2023