Cloisterfuck
Guy Louden & Pascale Giorgi
13 August – 5 September 2021 at Private Island
Cloisterfuck is an exhibition of sculpture, digital, and baked goods that adopt the forms of Gothic art and architecture. The medieval age tends to stand for the base and bodily, the grotesque and esoteric. This show considers how the chaos of the dark ages could represent different and empowering ways of thinking and being.
For Pascale Giorgi, the medieval peasant becomes a potential symbol of folk power and bodily autonomy. Medieval defensive architecture is warped and kneaded into objects of personal preservation that dream of rebellions and toppled kingdoms. A ceramic castle shields a sourdough starter, and a fort made from baked bread encloses speakers playing peasant folk-electro.
Guy Louden’s work emphasises a parallel between Gothic ways of thinking and our own – increasingly contemporary systems of knowledge appear obscure, esoteric, and grotesque. 3D scans of medieval sculpture are rendered into flat and glitched icons, hand-illuminated and mounted on blackened wood. In a custom video game, a maze generates around the player, an algorithm spiralling around our every click.
Work: Sculpural – Pascale Giorgi. 2D and digital – Guy Louden. Photos: GL