Against the Will, Against Staying Still is a group exhibition curated by Babak Ahteshamipour that frames urgency as both a creative method and a survival tactic in response to a world dominated by crises, algorithmic optimisation, and accelerated media environments. The participating artists — Erifili Doukeli, Matthew D. Gantt, Berenike Gregoor, Nichole Shinn, Captain Stavros, and Pauvre Terre — treat artmaking as a form of rapid response, deploying improvisation, upcycling, and fictional tools to navigate systems of control, including the figure of the curator cast here as a kind of authoritarian game master.
Set within the deliberately austere space of Esto Association — reminiscent of Foucault’s disciplinary institutions — the exhibition interrogates how aesthetic and procedural constraints mimic broader societal pressures: surveillance, self-optimisation, and commodified identity shifts. Drawing on thinkers such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Geert Lovink, Byung-Chul Han, and Nick Dyer-Witheford, the show critiques the burnout-inducing imperatives of late capitalism, while also exploring how immediacy, play, and glitch can serve as tactics for resistance.
Rather than reject urgency as debilitating, the exhibition proposes it as a weapon, capable of destabilising hyper-curated, algorithmic regimes of truth and meaning. It poses a central question: how might artists turn the logic of the system against itself, transforming gameplay into a form of subversive agency?
As Babak write, "the process of the show has been entirely gamified".
There'll be a game by Matthew D. Gantt as well.
LINK: Against the Will, Against Staying Still
LINK: Babak Ahteshamipour
