- Venue
- The Zabludowicz Collection
- Location
- London
Slip off your shoes, submerge into a ball pit and watch a film of … well I am not entirely sure. Sometimes, art is just fucking weird, but at Jon Rafman’s solo show at Zabludowicz Collection, I caught a glimpse of the future and had a blast doing so.
Entering the mad, mad world as simulated by Rafman is beyond any coherent, determined description I could ever manifest, but I will muster my eloquence to unpick the unfolding absurdity.
The atmosphere is dark like the blue-black of the deepest sea, then drawing you in are beacons of artificial light. Illuminated immersive sets are sporadically stationed around the space – the first encounter being the ball pit, Still Life (Betamale). Under the mass of pearly iridescent balls, you gaze up towards a screen playing a film of endless digital imagery spliced together in a twisting, cryptic narrative. Buried in the pit, you feel the life-consuming weight of the Internet, like the late nights lost to the dark-side of the web.
Regain your composure and nestle into Mainsqueeze (Hug Sofa) where the sofa literally hugs you, but similar to Still Life the effect is perilously close to smothering. Although, we need comforting as we watch an anime couple making out and a bodybuilder crush a watermelon betwixt his thighs. Soothed on the outside whilst your mind is a mess – the sensation is extremely unsettling.
Relentless, seductive, repulsive: the video works by Rafman are composite and engrossing as you descend deeper into unreality. However, often the sculptural sets overwhelm the moving image.Sticky Drama is the foremost example – inside the kitschy teenage room defiled by splashes of florescent green slime, I was too distracted by the detritus of a pre-teen girl to spare my attention to the film. The screen feels so separate to the space that this disjuncture ultimately spoils the immersion.
The pièce de résistance requires a bit of a hunt and wait. Wandering along the tangled paths of a hedge maze, you pass Rafman’s glitchy busts in pursuit of the treasure in the centre – an Oculus Rift. Experiencing this virtual reality system, as you are transported up and over the maze everything feels familiar and yet foreign, and genuinely I gasped at the sheer believability of the appliance.
If you can endure all that – congrats and don’t worry – because a well-deserved rest comes in the form of a massage chair and waterbed to watch the next assortment of films. It all may seem ridiculous but Rafman’s work is not stupid, as the boundaries between virtual and reality become blurred, the life we lead online and our existence offline are no longer distinguishable.
I left Zabludowicz feeling a little braindead, disorientated and blinded by the sunlight of real life. I had just been on a journey, in and out of a digital world. Then, it dawned on me; we are already trapped in this world of our own making.
