Exhibition

A Mating Game. An ongoing rehearsal by Krystle Patel

14th Oct 25 -> 24th Oct 25

12-5PM. ANNEX, 1 Tiverton Street SE1 6NT

Heights

Artists

Krystle Patel

Politics, Aesthetics and the Attention Economy

How contemporary media outlets are using aesthetic tools of affect to blur information with emotion and imagination. When “being informed” becomes fused with violence and desire, weaponised in the war for attention. London-based artist Krystle Patel presents A Mating Game: a site-specific installation and a series of open rehearsals that dig into the war for your attention.

The project asks what it is to be informed in the contemporary, highlighting the impact of our relationship with the digital. Decades of evolving interfacing have flattened language for technological ease of use. The symbolic has been usurped by the iconic. Our digital interactions are not what they present themselves to be. We utilise metaphors to interact with our smartphones and laptops, bypassing lengthy instruction manuals and coding education. These metaphors have become habituated and compressed; they no longer seem strange. Yet perhaps we can feel the strangeness, and the instability of these interactions manifests as suspicion. We question the flat form of what we see, hear, and read but do we question the impact that this flatness has on our understanding and use of language?

The framework for information, interaction, and knowledge has changed. Truth now comes with an aesthetic as we wade through the sludge of content, algorithmic suction pulling at our feet. Reliable sources, networks, individuals promote themselves as beacons of honesty. Behind the frame of our screens there is only us, only one, solitary, solitude, alone. And our feed does feed us. It feeds our fears and desires at highly compressed, breakneck speed. Maybe this is what it feels like to shoot off into space: endless flow. Time flies when you’re having fun but disappears altogether in a dreamlike state, closing your eyes at night only to open them suddenly and find it morning.

THE REHEARSAL

This project is a refusal. A refusal of momentary online outrage and short term explosive communities. A commitment to real and prolonged time. A creative process with interruptions, questions and error as its foundation. The exhibition is a rehearsal space. Using non-actors, we open up our language, making it more corporeal, more structured. We use the format of a learning play (Brecht). We push non-verbal language. We make decisions about gesture, staging and linearity. Krystle Patel has written a play that re-inserts the symbolic and abstract into language. An attempt to ‘thicken’ it again. To undermine the compression that is essential for algorithmic flow. Gifting it structure and space once more. Eyes and mouths online become borderlands. What is leaking from them? A surge of energy that fails to complete a thing. The private sphere has subsumed the public

OPEN REHEARSALS

The space will function as a rehearsal. ‘Open rehearsals’ are scheduled as performances. Outside these events, the public may view the sculptural set and existing rehearsal footage. These open rehearsals are a space for conversation. A space to think through what it is to be informed in the contemporary. To use liveness to explore how emotion and imagination have penetrated informational language.

We absorb art and become absorbed by politics. What if this functioned in reverse?

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Krystle Patel is a London-based Asian artist. She uses writing, sound and textile to create moving image works and site-specific installations that interrogate the construction and value of relationships through language.

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