The collaborative duo Pennacchio Argentato make art based on their considerations of the role of technology and mass media in society today, and the impact it is having in redefining our sense of identity, community and morality. Understanding identity on both collective and subjective levels, their works look to portray the means for harnessing the collective conscience of the public through communication media. Creating environments that incorporate graphically vivid sculptural and video works, they focus on the human subject, simultaneously reflecting on the construction of our virtual selves through today’s communication technologies, where biographies can be temporary, fluid, disparate and multi-faceted. Analysing medium, message and affect, Pennacchio Argentato adopt a position that is neither for nor against such technological advancements, but remaining critically aware.

YOU WILL NEVER BE SAFE

2013

LEG#1, ARM#1 and FEET#1

2013

EYE VS. EYE

2014

22 TI 1, 22 TI 2, 22 TI 3, 22 TI 11, 22 TI 22, 22 TI 222

2014

Two installations combining clusters of sculptures and video focusing on the body have been arranged by Pennacchio Argentato for the exhibition at M HKA. Both include sculptures of fragmented bodies produced in Carbon Kevlar or Titanium, materials that have a military use for protective combat equipment, which here are strewn around the floor like a skin that has been shed. Resembling discarded prosthetics, they hint towards our post-biological selves, imagining logical extensions or improvements to the body. An animation of an eyeball Eye vs. Eye floats in space, observing us observing. The text “YOU WILL NEVER BE SAFE” serves as a screen for a hypnotic, animated screensaver type image. The words paraphrase a statement intended for and circulated by the media, by one of the two men who killed and disembodied a soldier on the streets of London in May 2013, spoken at the scene of the incident. Reflecting on the main intermediary between events and society, Pennacchio Argentato look to portray how the media exercises its ferocious appetite for consuming and regurgitating crises. (NH)

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