Machines of Desire

How do we find a way to expand the fabric of space and time? Can we defy the physics of reality through the innate drive of desire? Rather than create a world apart from our own, the exhibition Machines of Desire summons a vision of a parallel universe that exists as a palimpsest on our current reality, writing and rewriting the codes of memory and existence through art-making across different generations. 

Curated by Emilia Yin and Kat Sapera, the group exhibition Machines of Desire pursues the idea of “the desire machine” as a metaphor for the transcendent, glitch-triggering effect that art in the modern era can engender. With a focus on both historical and contemporary artists whose works play with and complicate familiar aesthetic languages and functions, Machines of Desire seeks to encourage a reading of art as a mode of contemporary mythology or folklore, a space where shared documents of memory metamorphose into forms previously unrealised.  

Looking at and beyond the impact of Surrealism, the artists in this exhibition utilise the energy of their personal and collated memories to create material that subverts reality, and in doing so, allows new possibilities to spill into the visible world and collective consciousness.

A journey through the layers of images and emotions that are invoked through the magic of artmaking, Machines of Desire asks viewers to interrogate the ways in which art can conjure, keep, and project souvenirs of the past, present, future – whether they be real or imagined.