Issey Kang and Giulia Ley
Fairytale Ambitions
5 June – 17 June 2024
Hackney Gallery
Fairytale Ambitions questions whether the desire to animate the inanimate is inherent to childhood. It is in our nature, prior to adolescence, to extract the fantastical from the mundane. We idolise that which adults disregard. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s assertion that playthings form “the first initiation of the child to art,” Fairytale Ambitions examines the dialogue between play, psyche, and artistic creation through a series of craft objects and photographs that imbue the doll with a soul, which it loses when the child reaches adolescence.
In the fashion of the Post-surreal and Post-internet, Kang and Ley use the Unheimlich (the uncanny) to make sense of the last decade – a period of endless digital pastiche, online insanity, millennial satirising and political abhorrence. We draw on the idea of the Technoromantic (Kat Kitay, Spike Magazine) and from de-virtualised online culture. Fairytale Ambitions is not escapist or indulgently pessimistic; rather, the exhibition mocks the self-infantilisating of contemporary society. In the face of turmoil, there is a return to fantasy. Refiguring stereotypes, as Cindy Sherman did in her 1985 series Fairytales, we explore the perverse side of dressing up. We mythologise a new set of archetypes, old fairytales perverted by internet lingo; the pussy pirate, the slutty school shooter, the deformed Barbie doll, the zombie fighting heroine, the succubus and the impotent Ken doll. These new heroes can follow the yellow brick road out of the digital and into a tangible, crumbling gothic castle.
Dolls, Dollhouses, B-Movies, American Sniper (2014), Balthus, Sigmund Freud, The Cosmetic, Silent Hill, Anna Karenina (1873), Plastic, The Bloody Chamber (1979), Paula Rego, Flash Games, Inertia, Morality, Steam Punk.
Curated by Lydia Eliza Traill, featuring works by Issey Kang and Giulia Ley
Ran from 5 June to 17 June 2024 at Hackney Gallery
The Exhibition Catalogue, which was published in an edition of 100, is available to purchase here.
