London-based, Istanbul-born artist and curator Emre Ataman, under the curatorial collective In Days of Heatwave, presents Enfant Terrible, a weekend-long journey into the minds and diverse practices of twelve of London’s most promising emerging artists. The exhibition asks itself and its audience what happens when the world one is promised no longer exists, redefining the mythologies of adulthood and possibility through questioning, accusation, and creation.
Azevedo, Untitled
Standing guard outside of the old Victorian school gymnasium is the first piece that brings you into the world of Enfant Terrible: Portuguese-Brazilian artist Joana Azevedo’s Untitled. Plastic army figurines are arranged in concentric, overlapping circles facing outwards, alert and at attention, ready to point and shoot.
Azevedo, Untitled
Azevedo, Untitled
Azevedo, Untitled
This piece subverts the innocence of its medium through the figures’ interactions not with one another, but the viewer. Yet through its diminutive size, it conveys the feelings of a child who does not quite understand how to express their emotions, seeking to utilize play as a way of acting out feelings or frustrations that cannot be more explicitly communicated. Azevedo’s other piece in Enfant Terrible continues to toy with the narrative of play, which suggests an unexplored importance of the emotions of children that are disregarded by the authoritarian figures.
Howell, Untitled (Richard Prince)
Like British artist and Goldsmiths student Charlie Howell’s Untitled (Richard Prince) which is a brazenly detailed reproduction of Prince’s own Untitled (cowboy) series from 1989. All of Howell’s work in Enfant Terrible appropriates Prince’s imagery in a way that suggests he is not simply a disciple of Prince and other pop artists like Warhol, but an heir to these artists and their commitment to exposing the hollow within the guarded treasure chest of cultural representation.
Yet he is only present on Hollywood sets, his wild rides confined to the whims of directors and producers. This makes artists like Howell and others on display in Enfant Terrible the true cowboys for their ability to poke holes and question these myths. Thinking about Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, one can understand how Howell’s reinterpretation of Prince’s work through practice brings these myths closer to their audiences which lets them investigate and question them alongside the artists themselves.
This is an act of empowerment, especially for masses that are constantly relegated to algorithm-fed images.
Howell, Untitled (Richard Prince)
Slade School of Fine Art student and multimedia artist Odie-Grace Urum-Kalu’s pieces on display further symbolize how reproduction and appropriation function in a mediated society. So Meta features an uncanny distortion of Mark Zuckerberg’s image—his gaze manages to penetrate through multiple panes of acetate even when broken up, suggesting an eerie sense of power and surveillance. Zuckerberg was once a defiant “enfant terrible” himself, but his descent into technological tyranny combined with immense wealth and power reveal how delicate the balance between success and nonconformity can be.
Benjamin noted how within film, “the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.” London video artists like Istanbul-born Ela Kazdal and Effie Cherif, originally from Amsterdam, employ the camera as a witness to tell their own stories, with each image as a necessary part of the narrative. Both artists use film to convey the power of memory and meaning-making, but they diverge as to how. Kazdal plays with material and nostalgia while Cherif recreates a memory of fellow artist JWOW, which creates a dialectical element to the exhibition.
Catalan-Italian digital artist Domenec Miralles’ movements controversially utilizes artificial intelligence to create a narrative that constantly reinvents itself through sequence, which means that the meaning of each single picture is illusory and constantly seeking itself.
Bailey, Two Men Touching
I was quite drawn to South-London filmmaker and photographer Aarony Bailey’s work, which featured UV printing on condom wrappers, through a deconstructed lens of pleasure. The use of condom wrappers as a canvas not only drew attention to how certain relationships are questioned by society along with notions of protection, but also visually broke up the imagery and managed to evade the exposition or voyeuristic elements that tend to come along with sexual or embodied photography. The prints become almost more intimate and humanize the subjects in a different, more tender way than if through a flattened image.
Brazilian-born, Australia-raised and UK-based JWOW’s IT’S ALL GOOD is a recreation of the artist’s own accident. In this piece, the art becomes a simulacrum of a bygone experience. Quite embodied in its use of the artist’s own blood and clothing, the piece confronts the viewer in its immediacy. There is something challenging and familiar about the staging of the disembodied body which recruits a subversion of how the child is/isn’t protected. Taking its name from Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2014 cookbook, Gwyneth herself is an interesting figure to put in conversation with the punk spirit of the “enfant terrible.” JWOW’s piece features a distressed copy of the book. On the cover, Paltrow promises “DELICIOUS, EASY RECIPES that will make you LOOK GOOD and FEEL GREAT.” An accident produces the opposite effect.
JWOW, IT’S ALL GOOD
Atamann’s Broken Compass possesses depth in its use of materials. Though the veneer of glass is cracked in different directions, suggesting that it is not just political divisions that are harming society, but identifiers in general. Yet loosening the clamp would shatter the entire pane, leaving left only what’s underneath: wood.
Living, breathing wood. Goldsmiths graduate Enoch Hitchcock and Camberwell sculpture student Sydney Robson additionally work with wood in pieces like Roof and Mouse. Using a material that is simultaneously foundational and flexible demonstrates how these young artists are seeking to question and reshape the given truths one is fed throughout childhood and adolescence, fashioning something utterly new out of the old.
Sacof, Class Clown
Ceramacist Ines Sacof’s Class Clownuses found materials in a postmodern pastiche of the titled figure. Another recognizable archetype, the class clown is traditionally punished for how they disrupt and act out against authority. Sacof’s depiction, particularly through the orientation of the figure, alludes to a rejection of that punishment.
At a cultural moment in which the ability of youth to think for themselves is questioned, this piece asserts that it is in fact in full force.
Sacof, Class Clown
While the exhibition is no longer on display at Deptford’s Art Hub Studios, In Days of Heatwave is currently working on creating a book to complement the themes explored in Enfant Terrible. This reminds us that the spirit of rebellion and individuality can never be quelled, the fire and desire to question only grows stronger.
Simone De Beauvoir noted in The Ethics of Ambiguity that the child’s subjectivity and ability to question comes at a point when he realizes the contradictions and vulnerabilities of adults. It is then up to the child to decide whether or not he will answer the call to participate in the artifice of their enterprise. The artists in Enfant Terrible do not answer this call. They instead call upon one another and revel in their own authenticity in the face of facade.
Photography by: Earl Gibson (@earlgibsonn)
