National Gallery X and Royal Opera House Audience Labs unveil three new commissions from groundbreaking digital artists responding to the new realities of our rapidly changing world
National Gallery X and The Royal Opera House’s Audience Labs, are delighted to announce The Rules Do Not Apply: three ambitious, boundary stretching digital artworks by talented new artists, Dennis Osadebe, a Nigerian mixed-media artist best known for his contemporary vibrant post-pop style; Fantasia Malware, a collective that makes fantastical, magical, corrupt, chaotic software, and Maf’j Alvarez, a digital media artist and creative technologist based in Brighton who creates collaborative and interactive immersive artworks, that seek to challenge existing power structures. The three artworks have just launched online
Inspired by the immense uncertainty and flux that is now a feature of our daily lives, National Gallery X, which is dedicated to exploring how technology can transform cultural experiences, and Audience Labs, the Royal Opera House artist-led innovation programme, were keen to investigate how the Covid pandemic could also provide a catalyst for reflection and change. They challenged artists to come up with imaginative responses to our ‘new normal’ taking as their inspiration two powerful works of art that reimagine and disrupt structures of power and play with the unexpected. They are:
- Eve, 2018: A piece of choreography by Kristin McNally about a female dancer emerging into a digital world, exploring how to make and remake, realising her power of creation free from the constraints of the real world.
- Paula Rego, Crivelli’s Garden, 1990-91: A large-scale triptych in the National Gallery collection chosen to reflect ideas of transformation and empowerment in Eve. Rego’s painting appropriates the strict linear perspective of 15th-Century painter Carlo Crivelli’s house and garden and reimagines the space to explore the narratives of women in biblical history and folklore found in various paintings across the National Gallery.
In response to The Rules Do Not Apply, Dennis Osadebe has explored Nigerian heritage, advancing technologies, and collaboration to construct an innovative experience that invites the viewer to discover their role as both instigators and witnesses within the powerful transformation of a shifting digital scene. In his unique signature style and fascination with interior spaces, Osadebe has generated a virtual room that draws inspiration from the linear perspective of Renaissance paintings, akin to the style of Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden (1990-1). The objects occupying the space also signal the influence of Rego’s historically rooted work, as we find symbolic relationships through symbols of statues, references to childhood, performance, and mythology.
Fantasia Malware responded to the brief with their work The Life of Saint Fiona Bianco Xena, which tells the hotly disputed story of the fictitious saint’s life. Multiple interpretations of key moments in Saint Fiona’s life are presented in a hyper-chromatic, unholy panorama – a maelstrom of figures, stories and symbols occurring on different timelines, dimensions and scales. An elderly woman with red painted cheeks cradles a wounded child tenderly to her breast, mother of the motherless. A crystal-eyed robot holds a bouquet of roses, a cigarette hanging roughly from her lips. A thick-thighed girl with a long green braid kicks and pirouettes, taking impossible leaps in the night sky. Saint Fiona is a kaleidoscopic vision of one woman seen through three rotating eyes, an illusion of separated light scattering in different directions. The work is a comment on how the stories of women in the public eye are retold, twisted, mutated and used as a projection screen for the exorcising of current social and cultural demons.
Maf’j Alvarez imagines entering a surrealist painting using VR in her piece Eva Quantica, a dreamlike bubble of lockdown Brighton as an open world to explore the various simultaneous selves of Eve. Hands for hills, a cupcake pavilion, platforms, statues, depictions of people and the glowing lifeforce surging through everything. Maf’j’s piece is about female power, patriarchy, immigration, tradition and obligation. She explores technology as an agent of power for women and its consequences and wants to challenge the rules that always apply. The commission is experimental and explores embodiment with motion capture, she says “My ability to be creatively, financially and technologically independent is both liberating and frightening due to the obligation like Eve, to do something with it that is meaningful and impactful whilst nourishing and protecting myself and my family.”
Annette Mees, Audience Labs, The Royal Opera House says, “we are really excited about the possibilities of this commission, we have two very different starting points with Eve and Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden, both of which have emerged from a long artistic tradition. To see them being re-invented by three vastly different contemporary artists, three very different points of view, it’s thrilling, this is new art.
Lawrence Chiles, Head of Digital Services at the National Gallery, says, “the collaboration between the Royal Opera House’s Audience Labs and National Gallery X came about as a response to the times, where there was a greater need and appetite for digital culture. The Rules Do Not Apply commission is a powerful illustration of how NGX is alive and open to new artistic possibilities”.
