Scene XVII: pity this busy monster

We live in difficult times, defined by anxiety, disorientation, and the uneasy sense that what we once knew and trusted now generates dread. This drift from the known into the unknown - from equilibrium into flux, from beauty into horror - has been widely articulated in art, film, and literature, but it has felt especially acute in cinema over the past year, notably in the paranoia of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle after Another and Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Del Toro’s (and Mary Shelley's) monster, stitched together from human ego and failure, becomes a mascot for our moment: a figure we believe we recognise but do not, created to reshape order yet ultimately exposing its fragility. A body made of bodies, a life born of death, the creature exists as both hero and anti-hero, antagonist and protagonist, catalysing shifts in time, space, colour, and mood.

 

Modelled in our likeness yet emptied of comforting humanity, it reflects a shared condition in which life feels increasingly precarious, and agency has slipped into political and technological bodies of our own making, standing as a totem and cipher for a fractured present that hovers uneasily between abstraction and figuration. Taking the idea of 'The Creature' as a leitmotif for our fractured present, the show explores this as a catalyst for unease, transformation, and the slippage between abstraction and figuration, the otherness of space, and altered reality.