Installation view of The Slow Longing at Goldsmiths University, London (UK), 2019.
4K video and sound(14:07), custom-made fabric, benches, curved screen (350cm x 130cm) , glitter painted projection wall, LED lights, insect-robot, performance.
Photographs by Paul Chapellier.
Installation view of The Slow Longing at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City (UK), 2019.
4K video and sound(14:07), custom-made fabric, benches, curved screen (350cm x 130cm) , luna landscape painted wall, LED lights, insect-robot, 3 looping tablets.
Exhibition Text:
Broadway Gallery is pleased to present A Slow Longing Collapse, a solo exhibition by the artist Sofia Albina Novikoff Unger. This exhibition centres around a video installation, which presents the first episode of a planned trilogy that explores the hybridisation of nature and artifice on a global scale.
Assuming the form of an anthropomorphised rabbit, Niva, a tired trickster character, searches for a friend who has disappeared, imagining a fictive world set in the future with reference to the ‘before’, sometime around 2100. The work weaves together ideas and concepts from biological and cultural strands concerned with new technology, such as chimeras; brain decoders; angel particles; moonlight as a cure; quantum computers; and the ‘efficiency dilemma having gone wrong’.
The video combines footage shot in a variety of locales with CGI imagery and meditates on the concept of the postmodern sublime, where the sublime object of infinite greatness has been replaced by technological processes, becoming pure spectacle, that is, nature distilled as constructed artefacts.
Surrounding the video are several video wall holograms projecting different scenes of Niva and other objects which transform and dissolve, as well as an insectoid robot that is programmed to function independently within the exhibition space.
Photographs by Corey Bartell Sanderson.
