Matthew Emery
What the Fuck Are We Supposed to do?​
Exhibited with Critical Edge as part of "and you would have to believe it"
June 2024, Copeland Gallery Peckham
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For "and you would have to believe it", Critical Edge Collective organised a group exhibition exploring themes of knowledge and power, particularly how systems of information colour our perceptions of the world around us. The exhibition questions: "What evidence do we use to test whether the information we receive is reliable?", "What sources of knowledge do we trust?", and "Whose interest do information systems serve?".
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"What the Fuck Are We Supposed to do? (2024)
Oil and acrylic on canvas
​165x290cm

This work draws inspiration from the early 20th-century Futurist movement, a time when artists enthusiastically embraced the possibilities of technological progress and imagined a utopian, capitalist future shaped by innovation. However, history has told a different story. Rather than liberating society, these advancements have been co-opted to further entrench systems of control and exploitation, giving rise to the so-called 'cognitarian class', individuals perpetually tethered to their labour and to cycles of consumption.
In our digital age, personal interests are commodified and converted into data points through clicks, likes, and endless engagement. Access to information and participation in online culture is contingent upon submission to these terms. Even platforms aligned with leftist or socialist ideals are not immune. We find ourselves confined within algorithmically engineered echo chambers, eventually turning against one another over issues pushed onto us for profit and for power.
Formally, the work adopts Futurist aesthetics; fragmented movement, dynamic composition, and visual complexity, to evoke the chaos of contemporary technological life and the impossibility of imagining any kind of linear route away from capital domination. ​

June 2024, Copeland Gallery Peckham

Photographed alongside works by Susan Askew and Te Palandjian/Nele Bergmans (collaboration)