PV Thursday 23rd January 6pm
24th January – 1st March 2025
Chino Moya’s output spans a wide range of forms from feature films to gallery-based video installation, sculpture and photography. Meta-Mythical Optimisation is an exhibition composed of twelve video works depicting isolated figures dressed in utilitarian fabrics, who are slowly performing subtle, considered movements. Each figure is situated in a static landscape filled with geometric architecture, arches, domes, a starved classicism most associated with past totalitarian regimes or utopian futures. The structure of the images alludes to the language of renaissance painting, relocated to a post-work future, depicting a priest-class of technocrats. The precise gestures of these robed figures imply a mediative state, further underscored by a oneiric drone that rises and falls across the gallery’s rooms.
The slow crescendo of sound is punctuated by a narrator from an altogether more unsettling film by Moya, which emerges from the rear of the gallery. A familiar and trustworthy voice narrates a history, relating and dissecting future ‘events’ and the cascade of their ramifications. In this film the camera is newly mobile, panning across fetid landscapes and polluted seas. This world is populated by cadaverous avatars walled up in their virtual domestic spaces, opulent and ornamented in the Rococo style. In a stark contrast with the other works, the narrative and movement allows the viewer to unpick the history of this world, supplanting our initial reading of a pure techno-pragmatic future, with its implications of post-work, post-hunger, post-suffering. Here office work has somehow become a nostalgic leisure sport activity. Moya’s vision is contradictory and ambiguous, upsetting the utopia-dystopia binary to which we are accustomed, perhaps alluding to Redfern Jon Barret’s idea of an ambitopia, where complex, contrasting visions of possible future are allowed to flourish.
Chino Moya (b. 1976 Madrid) lives and works in London. He has video work currently on show at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in an exhibition titled after his work Digital Witness. Recent shows include Decoding the Black Box at the Museum Stadt Sindelfingen, Germany, the arts and technology fair Voltaje in Bogotá, Colombia and After Human at Steinhauser Gallery, Slovakia.
In 2021 Moya released his debut feature film “Undergods,” funded by the British Film Institute and Ridley Scott’s Black Dog Films. Premiering in cinemas in the US and the UK, it was selected as Film of the Week by The Guardian and garnered attention in The New York Times and the BBC, among other publications. His previous short films have received awards and have been featured in festivals worldwide.
Seventeen and Chino Moya would like to thank SOLO, an international project based in Madrid that fosters contemporary art, along with its new media art support programme Onkaos, for their generous support in making this exhibition possible.
Press
Chino Moya, Technomater, 2025
4k single-channel video, looped
210 x 84 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Unitive Knowledge of the System’s Dynamic, 2025
4k single-channel video, looped
219 x 175 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Technomater, 2025
4k single-channel video, looped
210 x 84 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Eumeswil, 2025
4k single-channel video, looped
124 x 73 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Metapope, 2025
4k single-channel video, looped
230 x 84 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Managerial Transmutation, 2025
4k three-channel video, looped
293 x 97 x 10 cm
Chino Moya, Three Fluctuations, 2025
Single-channel video with sound, 7 min 4 sec
