VELCRO adorables

VELCRO ADORABLES There is a pool and I’m soaking in it. Densities of fluffy animals, teletubbies, soft gaze and sugary promises, curt smiles and schoolchildren, colorful media interfaces, babies, brisk breeze all day, staying in my cozy room all day, dreams I had as a child, mourning youth, popular scary stories, serious play, helplessness, a murmur, an achoo, a boom, a vivid dance, a vroom, pictures of me as a kid, a smash, a fizz, some kitten reels. Come play with me, says the sweet scary creature with big mouth. Come stay with me, says the lost heart-shaped key that hides beneath the couch cushions. Are you my creator? asks the memory of me climbing onto my father’s shoulders. You wanna fight? and two pink little baby fists come together for the first time. I hear a sweet crying and I feel plush stuck in my teeth. I’m starting to panic. Don’t be such a pansy, says a baby crow giving me a green rock as a gift. I ask myself why I’ve always felt the urge to bite and pinch and destroy cute little things. Taking these speculative invitations as a starting point, it came to understand that aesthetic categories can be grounded in ambivalent feelings (cute and scary, zanny and creepy, lovely but threatening) that can be used to steer clear of the unitary heteronomous fallacies that communicate aspects of our contemporary visual experiences and personal emotional structures. Our visual culture shouldn’t rely that much on binarities, on positive/negative assumptions. Sianne Ngai in her study OUR AESTHETIC CATEGORIES: Zany, Cute, Interesting encourages us to move beyond traditional aesthetics categories like “beautiful” or “ugly’’. Contradictory reactions to a certain object are expected and can communicate our complex ambiguous relations to pleasure, consumption and oppression in late capitalism. Our affects are pursuing a sense of contradiction stranded at the peripheries of our stimuli, generated by hypercommodities that leads simulteanously to our complex social structures and behaviour. We need to consume but we hate the things we’re consuming. We love to show ourselves but we get anxious if we show too much. We love cute things but we want OUR CUTE THINGS to be taken seriously. This state of indeterminacy appears in VELCRO ADORABLES shaped as multiple materials and actions, as well as content of the works, exploring through contemporary visual codes and affects significant themes such as lost innocence, atemporal creatures, multifarious ability of remembrance, domestic vulnerable functions, fluffy sculptures, subversive potential of clumsiness, states of weakness and anxiety, capitalism’s glossy, desolation and puppies, imperceptible steps of time and processes of revisiting discomfort, reinvent movement and finally - play. From painting and sculptures, to audio-visual and performativity, the exhibition anchors in a myriad forms of deeply intimate And cute And zanny And interesting manifestations.