SUNDAY SCARIES

groupshow curated by Le Syndicat Magnifique
from November to December 2017
at 22,48m2, Paris (FR)

with Nils Alix-Tabeling, Alain Garcia Vergara, Juliette Goiffon & Charles Beauté, Rachel Maclean, Nicolas Momein, Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves, Jennifer May Reiland and Pierre-Guilhem.

 

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After a long week of work, you let off steam on Saturday night. Sunday then becomes the time for a torpid questioning of your entire existence. Laying in bed all day, regretting past decisions and reflecting with dread on a seemingly unsure future, from the vantage point of a precarious present. Sunday Scaries is commonly referred to as a temporary and unsettling feeling, which hits you after physically or mentally escaping from everyday life during the weekend.
 
This anxiety and fear of returning to the world and its requirements—productive, political, social and emotional responsibilities—inform the artworks brought together in the exhibition. Staying at home and idly dedicating oneself to solitary activities leads to a peculiar contentment of self-absorbed pity. This paradoxical comfort is nevertheless compromised by the awareness of the imminent end of the voluntary exile. The sense of culpability felt when escaping from the injunction of wellness and self-fulfillment sneaks into the domestic cocoon. In a society that praises action and sociability, the passive withdrawal into oneself fluctuates between discomfort and enjoyment. The urge to disconnect from the world for a few more hours is undermined by the compulsive temptation to turn to your phone or computer, devices through which external realities besiege the private sphere.
 
When faced with recent political developments linked to the already well-established rise of conservative and isolationist movements, the risk (temptation?) to remain in a daze is great. It is this paralyzing feeling of uncertainty and illegitimacy, this fearful melancholy that Sunday Scaries wishes to evoke.

 

 

images courtesy of 22,48m2