Body parts and found materials are combined en masse to create a sensory experience of chaos, uncertainty and isolation. Atrophy highlights the desensitisation towards trauma and violence that this unrelenting exposure induces within those living in affluent societies. The work considers the artists’ own position of living in the west, and the impact that media exposure has on their view of the world. The glimpses of the personal in the body casts remind the viewer of the real human experiences behind our mediated observations of global events. Further to this, it is a response to the depersonalising nature of the consumption and waste of neoliberal, capitalist societies.

Atrophy’s use of the dismembered, fragmented body to highlight disjuncture and alienation in human society is reminiscent of early modernist artists’ use of the body fragment to depict social upheaval and change. Yet the work is also transgressive in its desire to unsettle hierarchies in art, institutions and social relationships, in the hope of re-building a paradigm that will offer solutions to what the artists witness as a world, not so much in flux, but free-fall. The installation overwhelms the viewer with gritty overabundance, destabilising the privileged position of the ‘white-cube’ art gallery. The collaborative nature of Atrophy problematises the authority and ‘heroism’ of the solitary artist. These artists have opted for a democratic approach to art making; shifting away from art as independent object making, to art as a form of exchange and co-operation. Atrophy refuses to be didactic, universal or objective. Instead it confronts the complexity of contemporary Western society, by drawing attention to the personal, while overwhelming the viewer with the mass. It confronts the human paradox of being simultaneously fragile, yet also capable of destruction.

Atrophy exhibition Statement

Photography by Veronica Habib.