(This Room is a Sculpture Called) PROPHECY is a body of newly commissioned work by pioneering multi-media artist Auriea Harvey. Curated by Pita Arreola, PROPHECY is an allegorical rendering of a spiritual journey, charting a course to reclaim grace and unity amid a landscape of disconnection and collective suffering. At its core lies a deep yearning for empathy amongst fractured societies.
These themes resonate with the concerns of British mystic, artist, and poet William Blake (1757–1827), who more than two hundred years ago created a series of engraved prophetic books that in their own interdisciplinary capacity combined poetry and vivid imagery. Rooted in his exposure to London’s rapid and exploitative urbanisation and his visionary experiences, Blake came to view himself as a prophet, using his art to critique the moral, political, and spiritual conditions of his time.
Imbued with the same radical charge, PROPHECY carves its own mystical immersive system through a pollination of figures from Catholic faith with epic tales drawn from Greek mythos. The resulting exhibition is constructed as a mythic technological infrastructure made up of individual and interconnected digital artworks that are suggestive of religious architecture. This spatial arrangement, along with the presence of saintly figures in the galleries, seeks to evoke a moment of introspective reflection in the audience. Through this composition, Harvey presents the virtues and flaws that characterise a society ruled by technological frameworks, and invites us to explore the potential of spirituality and collective human action to emancipate oneself from algorithmic control.
Bringing together motion capture, holograms, AI-generated choreography and 3D printing within an interactive installation spanning three immersive chambers, PROPHECY is a counterstrategy to the pacifying impacts that contemporary technologies that AI and social media have on our perception of reality, calling for a rediscovery of spirituality and the empowerment of collective action. Harvey offers a poetic resistance to digital opacity, proposing that prophecy in the 21st century might not be about prediction, but about feeling, embodiment, and transforming the tools that govern us.
PRESS RELEASE: (This room is a sculpture called) PROPHECY
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