Søren Thilo Funder, Suicide Slide (Hand of God). Courtesy the artist.
Press release, August 2023
SixtyEight is pleased to invite you to a two part exhibition, which presents Danish artist Søren Thilo Funder’s PhD project Oceanic Horror – or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism. The artistic result of this research project will be shown in parallel at two venues, bringing together different trans-realistic narratives that revolve around the realm of high frequency trading, financialization and horror fiction in a multi-channel video installation.
The installation Oceanic Horror – or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism takes as its starting point a meditation on the unfathomably trash-ridden condition of the office spaces of the influential trading firm Island ECN, which throughout the 1990s revolutionized financial trading. Island, founded by computer programmer and free information idealist Joshua Levine, had offices on the 10th floor of 50 Broad St in the financial district of New York City. It housed the ultimate in avant-garde high frequency trading; they called themselves ‘Kings of the plumbers’, they were the ones who understood how to bank on the very infrastructure that facilitated the transaction of the stock, rather than the stock itself. It was here that high frequency trading was conceived, and was to leave its distinct mark on the future of economics. A form of trading that outmanoeuvred the human faculties, the speed of every microtransaction weaving ever-new threads in an opaque, unstable neuro-network of hyper-connected currents. A situation that today has not only come to define financial trading but, in the form of AI, is in the process of redefining the way our societies will operate more broadly.
The literal mess that these offices were left in and their absurd otherness, contrasts with how the financial market (and with it algorithmic transactions) has come to be considered the norm in contemporary society, shaping a sort of absolutism from which all societal and personal imaginations must ultimately emerge. The market, as an incontestable constituent of our realm of imagination, is somehow challenged in this eerie meeting with the physical mess it sprang from. From Island’s offices on the 10th floor, a thick fibre optic cable snaked down the marble staircase to the 6th floor, where Island kept its servers. Physically transporting information down through the building, the cable constituted a strange material manifestation of the imminent immaterial gush of financial trading.
Søren Thilo Funder, Cable ITCH (I don't wanna work at Island no more). Courtesy the artist.
The two exhibitions follow on from the culmination of Søren Thilo Funder’s Artistic Research PhD at the Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen, also titled ‘Oceanic Horror – or How to Survive the Night in the Haunted Mansion of Absolute Capitalism’, presented at Kunsthal 3,14 in Bergen. In this version of Funder’s PhD project, it is split across two locations with additional works.
At Portfolio X the core of the installation will articulate the key concerns of Funder’s PhD research, exploring the potential of utilizing the genre of horror fiction to create new narratives in a political and time-based artistic practice, and the temporal qualities and entanglements of the horror genre and how these relate in strange ways, not only to our current tempor(e)ality, but also to art practices that use the temporal as material. The research project searches for a certain condition found in horror fiction, which relates to its relentless nowness, a proposed prolonging of this now and its relation to the event and the quasi-event. And finally, how horror fiction wants to do things to the body — not only in a simple reaction mode, but in the very temporality experienced in and by the body.
At AGA Works the video piece Suicide Slide (Hand of God) is removed from the main installation and inscribed in the broader topic of ‘På korte kontrakter’ (On Short-Term Contracts), conceived by artists Kaspar Bonnén and Rose Marie Frang, which focuses on artists’ working conditions and possibilities for finding studio spaces in the city. In this context, the piece comments on the increasingly large role financial markets play in property speculation and urban development that is focused on high returns for investors, rather than an integrated cityscape for the citizens. It is paired with one of Funder’s earlier works, SURVIVALISM (Capital Letters), which further comments on the nature of working conditions, not only for artists but for the majority of people as we move into the deeper stages of late capitalist society.
'På korte kontrakter' is a multi-exhibition programme around Copenhagen. After showing at AGA Works, Suicide Slide will migrate to Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, where it will be on show in a new format along with the other exhibitions.
The exhibition has been curated by Christopher Sand-Iversen and Rebekka Elisabeth Anker-Møller
Søren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. They are narrative constructions that insist on new meaning being formed in the thin membrane separating fictions from realities. Invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and a need for new nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters.
SixtyEight is an artistic and curatorial research organisation, which seeks to uncover and develop the exchange between artists and curators and their creative labour. The exhibition Oceanic Horror is part of our current two-year programme, which has received support from the Danish Arts Foundation, Beckett-Fonden, Augustinus Fonden, and Knud Højgaards Fond, as well as Grosserer LF Foghts Fond and Rådet for Visuel Kunst, København Kommune.
Exhibition period: August 24 - September 23, 2023.
Suicide Slide
Opening August 24, from 5-8pm (kl. 17-20)
at AGA Works, Vermlandsgade 61
Exhibition period: August 24 - September 10
Opening hours: Wednesday – Sunday, 11-15
and by appointment: kasparbonnen@gmail.comOceanic Horror
Opening August 25, from 5-8pm (kl. 17-20)
at Portfolio X, Bredgade 71A, kl.
Exhibition period: August 25 - September 23
Opening hours: Thursday – Saturday, from 11am-5pm (kl. 11-17).