Off Site Project and Electric Artefacts present: Vacation at the End of the World

Featuring: Alice Bucknell, Juan Covelli, Xia Han, Keiken x Ryan Vautier, Wednesday Kim, Kumbirai Makumbe, Léa Porré, Eda Sarman and Georgia Tucker.
Dates: 04th December, 2020 - 04th February, 2021
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Electric Artefacts is pleased to announce Vacation at the End of the World, our second exhibition, curated by Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns of the online gallery Off Site Project.

Vacation at the End of the World brings together eight artists and one collective, whose varied practices have explored our propensity for escape and new models of futuring that present alternative ways forward. The collection features a total of twenty-six editions and for the first time presents an opportunity to tour the software used by the artists to commission an exclusive artwork, edition of one.

An intense orange sunset infuses the air, particulate matter spreading over the horizon and hanging in the immediacy before your face suffuses the membrane of your eyes, imbued in tensed inhalations up your nostrils. A colour palette once preserve of the holiday industry now evokes the dread of distant fires, metric tonnes of carbon capture released into the atmosphere, recalling a fateful summer spent in the Swiss alps by the Shelleys, Bryon and Polidori. Tomorrow looms with the possibility that the sunset will have eclipsed those distant hills, horrific fiction becomes reality.

As 2020 closes, contrary forces hold human opinion in a fine homeostasis. Warning signs have developed into literal warnings, sirens, bullhorns and first responders clearing houses, against which the economic imperatives and ingrained belief in perpetual growth force a continuation of twentieth century capital logics. Fattened on Hollywood’s dramatic total wipeouts and a Freudian death-drive, we walk hand-in-hand into a more mundane slow apocalypse, waiting for a catastrophe more fitting with our ideals of the Sublime.

Against a backdrop of drop-fed climate collapse and global pandemic, RyanAir slash prices and escapism takes on a perverse new subtext. Luxury and luxuriating on the beach are no longer solely a break from the 9-to-5, they are an escape from the ecological ruin of late-stage-capitalism, an opportunity to buy yourself temporary peace of mind, to turn off the news and no longer monitor the R number.

Visitors can purchase limited edition prints of the digital artworks, video pieces and five unique editions of ‘E-Z Kryptobuild Collectors' Coins.

You can visit Vacation at the end of the World here.

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For media inquiries: media(@)electricartefacts.art

All texts in the show by Off Site Project.

Cover image by Kumbirai Makumbe, Some Things, 2020