AL PAGE

FALSE FLAG

Asylum Studios, Suffolk

1.6.2024 - 9.6.2024

In 2020, during the COVID lockdowns, I would take long runs in the early evening through the sedate, leafy, ultra-wealthy suburbs of North Oxford, where I had found myself living during those ghostly years of the pandemic. As I ran, I would fantasize about breaking into the vast houses I was surrounded by, most of them empty, presumably because the professional and managerial classes who owned them had decamped to their country piles or rambling spots in the South of France. I imagined myself as a spectre, moving from room to room, haunting empty kitchens with vast fridge freezers, sleeping on expensive beds that didn’t belong to me, under heavy linen and Egyptian cotton sheets. The whole world seemed empty and silent, I believed everyone I loved was about to die.

I felt like a voyeur to my own life.

Out of this time came the work for this show; reflections on anger, loss, waiting, wasting time, growing older, classicism and ruination. Thinking about ad-hoc gatherings, political action on the street, forging solidarities between my siblings, both human and non-human. About the collisions between our failed futures; forever foreclosed by the event horizon of ecocide, and nostalgia for a collective past. The works emerge from reflections on anonymity, surveillance, moments when violence is imminent, when it has just passed, the possibilities for gathering in meaningful ways, and longing for community in the face of late capitalism’s voracious mechanised loneliness machine.

Capital is an animal that wants you alone, so it can consume you.  

A figure binds a knife to a piece of wood with gaffer tape, another wraps their face with a piece of fabric she finds on the ground. Flags are unfurled. There is the falsetto whine of drones overhead, and in the distance, sirens, always sirens.

Open weekends 11 - 4, weekdays by appointment please call 07772463827