No Anus/The Comic/Shitshow
Exhibition

Saturday 16 November 2024, 20:00
Exhibition-performance opening of No Anus/The Comic/Shitshow, an event born from the collaboration between Zorro Fork, S. de Jager, Alexandra Mason & Oli Surel

On the opening night, Zorro Fork will do a convoluted reading of negintelligible spirits—such as shirime and other anusless beings—guiding us into an exploration of closed and open systems, capitalism, gluttony, and more. Oli Surel will then introduce The Comic, a poetic score/worldette where an undercurrent of horror unsettles the boundaries of slapstick.


Sunday 17 November 2024, 17:00
Talk and discussion with Alexandra Mason, Mattin & Inigo Wikins

Inigo Wilkins and Mattin present Thirteen Theses on Shitshow: the Condition of our Present, which extends Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” beyond the degradation of online services, to diagnose a systemic decay within cultural capitalism. Through this lens, they argue that populist figures such as Trump exemplify a new age of political and cultural collapse, where spectacle and noise replace substantive governance. In conversation with Alexandra Mason, Wilkins will expand on the thesis, exploring the interconnected roles of capital, infrastructure, media, and AI in fostering a pervasive sense of entrapment and disillusionment in public life. Far from the end of history, they propose that we are witnessing an intensified cycle, one that demands theoretical and practical responses to confront the cumulative, self-perpetuating dysfunction of contemporary systems.

The discussion will also be live-streamed.

Zorro Fork has been exploring the theme of “No Anus” for many years, perhaps ever since their earliest memories. As a young child, Fork was deeply frightened by defecation, perceiving it as a part of themselves being lost forever. This fear of dissipation, a concept that troubles all beings, particularly those first coming to terms with it, became a central theme in their work. Fork’s devotion to this “bottomless pit” culminated in the imagery of an ouroboros not devouring its own tail, but as becoming its own tongue, a concept they introduced in Contraption (2010-2011). This vision evolved further in MANUAL OVERRIDE (2012-2013), a piece that was showcased at an event hosted in Berlin by the Jan van Eyck Alumni Association. In this piece, Fork presented a topological description of “the human as a torus” (a description that made Tzuchien Tho — who has translated Oli Surel’s The Comic into Mandarin — laugh his ass off).

Fork continued to delve into this theme, investigating the presence/absence of anus through a variety of lenses: Coil’s explorations via Bataille, black holes (as seen in The Pattern Butcher, forthcoming), the specter of the "shirime", the Mesoamerican “gente sin ano”, closed and open systems, capitalism, gluttony, and more.

For this exhibition, Fork has contributed a slide projection that blends documentary photography with images of clay tori they have sculpted, alongside a “holy anusless” sculpture — an angelic Thai Thepphanom figure that Fork rescued from a trash heap in Charlois, nurturing this discarded being back to presence — and accompanying text.

Oli Surel’s The Comic emerged from a series of sessions guided by Cunninghamian chance procedures for movement. Over a month of experimentation, primed by a soundscape of reworked “IDM” motifs, laugh tracks, syncopated Americana, and Foley from modernist burlesque cinema, Surel captured the parameters and fictional excess of these sessions through longer form recordings. In the late summer of 2024, he revisited and synthesized these recordings into text, creating The Comic — a poetic score/worldette (in English, French, and Mandarin) where an undercurrent of horror unsettles the boundaries of slapstick. As a gift to Rib, Surel will also present a banner featuring the dog (H)uma(n) (†2022) in a blissful moment of rest, drawing on a niche Nordic meme template.