(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria. 12th May- 29th June 2024Tension Fine Art Gallery, 135 Maple Road London SE20 8LP, London SE20 8LP

‘Mothership’ is a part of the exhibition ‘(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria’, running through to the 29th June at Tension fine Art Gallery until the 29th June 2024. ‘Mothership’ refers to all sorts of things, such as neuronal networking, synaptic fusion, interplanetary worlds, illusion, futurism, human hybridity, plant life, jelly fish, and science fiction. Repurposed electrical cable waste infers a sense of transmission and conduction. Mothership descends spilling out satellites of her imagined becomings. (a contemporary) Phantasmagoria includes work by Alison Aye, Emma Lilly, Carrie Grainger, Karen David, John Bunker, EC, Ken Turner, Matthew Collins, Matt Dennis, Paul Dewis, and Alison Aye.

John Bunker writes “‘(a contemporary) Phantasmagoria’ aims to question how we might understand the word ‘Phantasmagoria’ as conjuring up the magic-lantern shows of darkened eighteenth-century drawing rooms; or, in its more recent incarnation, as Walter Benjamin’s term for the fractured, kaleidoscopic nature of the experience of modernity. This show, ‘Phantasmagoria’, looks to enlarge the scope of Benjamin’s definition, the better to take the measure of our fragmentary, collagic, screen-mediated contemporary reality.

Collage and abstraction are used to open up or pulverise both picture plane and sculptural object, rendering them as sites of complex disruptions, antagonisms and mutations formed from disparate ideas from the history of art and the (de)materiality of the life we are living now. Delicate, fragile, improvisatory processes, chaos and control, in figurative, narrative terms, celebrate, visual storytelling and the power of illusion.

‘Phantasmagoria’ reflects ironically on the sense of loss, frailty and failure by which our era, the ‘High Anthropocene’, might one day come to be defined; but it also seeks to show how current artistic practice channels the multifarious, ineffable ways in which a contemporary phantasmagoria can act upon us, thereby becoming a catalyst for change.”