"Boxer Santaros: Do you ever feel like there's a thousand people locked inside of you?
Roland Taverner: Sometimes.
Boxer Santaros: But it's your memory that keeps them glued together. Keeps all these people from fighting one another. Maybe in the end, that's all we have. The Memory Gospel."
- Southland Tales, 2007
Curated by Ché Zara Blomfield
Set in 2024, when society in the United States has grown unstable due to climate change, growing wealth inequality, and corporate greed, Fluid Karma takes the form of an exhibition staged in a modernist gem in the Hollywood Hills, simulating Richard Kelly’s 2006 film Southland Tales.
The film sets an uncanny picture of now: a dystopian California where the role of media shapes our perceptions, celebrity culture infiltrates the U.S. political system, wars are waged, resources are dwindling, exploitation is rife, Earth itself is destabilised, and escapism is normalised.
In the film, Fluid Karma is both a perpetual energy generator and a drug. Both are created by the German company Treer utilising a compound that encircles the planet like a serpent beneath the Earth’s mantle – discovered off the coast of Israel. The drug – initially trialled on the U.S. military in Iraq – causes psychic ability and telepathy.
The exhibition revels in the coexistence of idealism and dystopianism, utilising modern Hollywood architecture as a scene to place artworks as protagonists to stimulate discourse on the supposed fork in the accelerating conical helix of time.
