FORNEVER
LOCATION
Galerie Itinerrance
DATE:
April. 2018
From London to Los Angeles, Tokyo to Paris, I’ve lived and worked in cities my entire life, and if there’s one thing that all have had in common, it’s a tension between the old and the new. Progress seems inevitable, yet history and tradition remain treasured commodities – hard to let go. Likewise, artists throughout history, including myself, have faced the same obstacle – how do we evolve without abandoning what distinguished us in the first place? As the rate of change increases exponentially, so too does the value of society’s collective memory, along with the few relics which remain to uphold the past. It was my ambition with the Fornever show to set past and future in dialogue with one another.
To initiate this project, I chose to revisit the image of the Riot Coke Bottle, but this time as an imitation of the iconic petrol bomb – the poor man’s grenade. A familiar yet daunting object, it’s been used to spark the fire of countless revolutions throughout history, so for me it was an irresistible symbol for change – an incineration of the old in sight of the new. What remains then are vestiges of the past, salvaged, repurposed and marvellously outdated, they remind us that no matter how hard we may fight the wheel of change, nothing can last forever – there is only Fornever.