Bonny Poon
Curator

Artists
Nik Geene, House of Haha, Sotheby’s Lala

Too Close To Home

Once upon a time, we drifted into the night. It always comes back to night. In the dark, we are more equal: a myth I will buy. In the dark, we can be more interchangeable. Here and there, we bump into an object or a body. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference. The best bodies I’ve known are the ones who can play the nicest objects. To say we gave up would be to say there is no future. Yet kids surround us—and so we pass the torch. I’ve recently learned that “contemporary” is not a vacuum; contemporary only means post-war. All along, I had thought of it as an intractable abyss, from which a never-ending sameness would engulf all sense of time, context, and direction. In the backroom, Steve McQueen’s Hunger plays silently. Resistance, the kids learn, is played out on screens. In the flowering of virtual space, bodies ascend to empty 2D signifiers for companies and their woke opposition alike.