Dearest, these are my notes
For my
Thriller.
1. Do you believe the world loves you?
Sister said to Satan: my diary is too hot for you is a newly commissioned installation from artists Josefin Arnell and Margaret Haines, presenting a collection of moving image works, texts and posters exploring their shared interests in ideas of destiny, collective experience and mysticism. Taken as a whole, the works present a shifting cast of culturally identifiable yet unattainable performers, appearing momentarily as apparitions across the exhibitions spaces, living double lives.
2. I eat. I have sex. I go to a gallery dinner. I throw up in the alley.
Arnell and Haines’ images slip between screens and display systems scattered across the exhibition space: their sliding narratives inviting a sense of telos that underpins the movements of characters throughout the works. Enacting perverted prophecies, the characters throughout the films occupy the position of actors in a wider plan, with boundaries and intentions that aren’t clear, walking dreamlike through a no man’s land of time and space out of joint. Ideas of hauntology hover at the edges, staining the environments with an implacable time, time that is undeniably current but broken, creating a new kind of fictional mode of exhibition making: one of mythologies.
3. What is the difference between auto insurance and a belief in god?
Sister said to Satan: my diary is too hot for you evokes legends and gods both contemporary and consigned to history, with the power they wield over their subjects permeating throughout. Alongside the specific naming of certain characters from mythology, the artists create powerful depictions of spaces on the peripheries of reality, ones characterised by youthful desires for escape and endorphins but anchored in the mundane reality of teenage life.
With special thanks to Martha Armitage, Regan Dockery, Sara Fridvalszk, Lily Hudson, Paola Koss, Joyce Lee, Selene Lee, Emmanouela Megkistou, Lawrence Prebble, Layla Salhab, Livier Sidabraite and Inga Tilda for bringing it to life.
