Baitball 01 — Harlesden High Street

Baitball Vol.1

"I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you"
Opening 5th January 2020 6-9pm
6th January - 29 February 2020

Baitball Vol. 1 is the first in a series of projects hosted by Like a Little Disaster, has kindly invited Harlesden High Street to host the gallery with curation by one of our de-facto represented artists, Twee Whistler.

The project factors into Harlesden High Street’s ethos of bridging cultural gaps, not only bring an audience to the artists but introducing the homogenous sectors of the art market to the artists outside of their scope.

Artists were chosen to fit within a remit of collaboration and engagement with the aquatic surroundings of Polignano a Mare where the project is taking place.

The exhibition space is composed as if it was the drift of a shipwreck, in which the sunken remains of a ship came to integrate with the seabed.

The baitball, a fleet of fish that compacts to escape predators, is portrayed here in a vain attempt to escape marine surroundings dotted with the remains of capitalism in the post-Anthropocene era.

Within this scenario, Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski fits into the guise of a mermaid obtained by distorting her appearance starting from a hot photo of her. Through this operation, she hides what initially intrigued her of the photo. The two opposite actions (selfie-shot and its modification) meet as a desire to conform to an ideal and in opposition to it in a context linked to the body /gender thematic.
The print by Diana Gheorghiu plays on the same topic, by adopting a process of digital disincarnation to critique today's obsession with healthy lifestyles and the growing wellness industry.

Finn Carstens proposes a painting with the tiles of a spa, which can be considered as a sort of human domestication of natural hot springs.
Alessandro Fogo works on a similar path; in his painting The ring of Fire he places fire in a swimming pool with the aim of investigating the semantics of objects, which - although removed from their original context - often maintain a sort of defined aura, becoming ambiguous, religious and sacred elements.
Similarly, Neckar Doll assembles compositions of objects (mashups) of different cultures and subcultures, that - by stratifying over time - merge in the same place, almost as if they wanted to prophesy a second return to Panthalassa (the only and gigantic ocean present on Earth at the time of the Triassic).

Davide Dicorato's work instead consists of a hybrid of "naturalia" (natural objects), and "artificialia" (human artefacts), this dualism is also present in Marco Giordano's practice,
who in his works reflects around the classic organic/artificial, man/machine, nature/artifice dichotomies, and their relative unhinging.
Nicola Gobbetto also revisits a natural element with artificial elements, making mythological references to the birth of Venus, which therefore mirrors the mechanisms of capitalist overproduction.

Jens Settergren examines another type of ideal representation; in fact, the artist uses the tropics as an instance of a collective (western) imagination: tropical scenography as a heterotopia that includes both pure idyll, recreational tranquillity and some more disturbing elements.
Harmful by nature, parasitic is the sculpture of Lorenzo Lunghi, capable of connecting via Bluetooth to nearby devices; in correlation, we can place Viola Morini's Cromo that reconstructs a crucial moment in life by transforming it into an archaic alien symbol.
Of a more biographical nature is the contribution of Avery Noyes, who places the emphasis on maritime life and the culture surrounding the Chesapeake Bay where he grew up.
Finally, Eva Vallania, inspired by Vittorio De Seta's Contadini del mare (peasants of the sea), provides an almost hyper-realistic representation of a ruthless battle (that of fishing) never really experienced, in an immobile image that does not tell but releases sounds.

Hosted works below