Sometimes it seems as if the clouds are burning suspended so low. When a circle appears in the distance, a pleasant sensation reaches us. This apparent illusion may mirror our desire to reach a better state, not here and now but… somewhere else. What do we long for and what do we dream of? Perhaps barren perspectives fuelled by blind desire are slowly no longer enough. In an era saturated with simulacra, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate a single proper reality. The daily pursuit of isolated stimuli keeps us alive. We romanticise successive minor impulses only to sigh quietly at the end of the day in a gesture of triumph. It is easy to fall into a trap. An apparent feeling of happiness quickly transforms into a bitter sense of loss that is difficult to describe. Moments that never arrive merely circulate within our imagination like empty signs in a closed circuit.

We leave behind trampled paths and tons of never used objects. Walter Benjamin wrote that the commodity is a fetish endowed with dreams. Buying, and the desire tied to it, becomes a form of compulsive iteration, another stimulus marking our everyday life. An illusorily seductive space slowly begins to wrap us in its cashmere tentacles. From now on, we exist for it rather than it for us. Fragments begin to assemble into a single smoke filled landscape. A lack of perspective pushes us toward an even greater libidinal drive. In an age of intensified consumption and technology, perhaps the only remaining alternative is immersion in nature. This return to familiar alternatives does not have to be driven by nostalgia; it may instead reflect a rebellious stance toward an advancing technocracy.

The image slowly begins to crack. New meanings emerge from beneath the surface concealed under the cloak of reality. Like the tank top of a certain hotel heiress, which became a symbol of our failure, exposing yet another trace of the simulacral nature of the internet. Repeated on a loop, urging us to stop being poor. And so the deconstruction of reality unfolds at the level of a meme with Wojak and the runway shows of Vetements externalising current tensions.

The exhibition examines issues related to runaway consumption through irony drawing the viewer’s attention toward escapist impulses. Pleasure often keeps us alive, yet it can also mark the beginning of affliction. In the exhibition, desire appears as a prelude to sluggish annihilation. This apparent contradiction petrifies fractures using ambivalence as a method for extracting inequalities. The artists gathered in the exhibition demonstrate that glitter and camp can also carry an accelerationist charge capable of rupturing an established order and assigning entirely new meanings. The exhibition asks questions about the role of pleasure and the need for consumption. To what extent do we control desires that become mechanisms regulating our everyday existence? The growing dependence on stimulation and its increasing intensity erodes our vigilance. The capitalist landscape spreads over us a sense of parallelism of functioning in a world where nothing is as it once was or as it might appear.

A dark glow slowly covers the surface, yet it leaves behind a shadow of hope like a light show in an abandoned arcade where only a meadow still evokes a trace of Elysium.