Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, Albion Jeune is pleased to present a group presentation of female New York-based artists Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade), Shuyi Cao (b. 1990, Guangzhou), Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon), Rachel Rossin (b. 1987, West Palm Beach), Hao Shuo (b. 1992, China), Fin Simonetti (b. 1986, Vancouver), and Ambera Wellmann (1982, Lunenberg) centred on George Bataille’s philosophical concept of Base Materialism, with a particular focus on animalism, materiality, and corporeality. Bataille’s notion disrupts traditional dualities by positing an active, irreducible base matter that resists idealistic ontological categorisations, thereby challenging conventional materialist paradigms and refusing...
Coinciding with London Gallery Weekend, Albion Jeune is pleased to present a group presentation of female New York-based artists Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade), Shuyi Cao (b. 1990, Guangzhou), Cindy Ji Hye Kim (b. 1990, Incheon), Rachel Rossin (b. 1987, West Palm Beach), Hao Shuo (b. 1992, China), Fin Simonetti (b. 1986, Vancouver), and Ambera Wellmann (1982, Lunenberg) centred on George Bataille’s philosophical concept of Base Materialism, with a particular focus on animalism, materiality, and corporeality.
Bataille’s notion disrupts traditional dualities by positing an active, irreducible base matter that resists idealistic ontological categorisations, thereby challenging conventional materialist paradigms and refusing the modernist fetishism of form. Base materialism insists on the importance of “raw phenomena” and the “seamy underside of human existence”.
This exhibition gains particular relevance as it coincides with the centennial of Surrealism. It sheds light on Bataille, a frequently overlooked adversary of André Breton, whose work significantly influenced Julia Kristeva’s seminal text “Powers of Horror” on Abjection.
