Jonas Lund’s solo exhibition ‘In the Middle of Nowhere II’ at ANNKA KULTYS GALLERY is featured on the website of Whitechapel Gallery.
In the Middle of Nowhere II
Swedish conceptual artist Jonas Lund has worked around the increasing digitalisation of culture for years, producing a body of work that investigates issues of creative labor, production, authorship, and authority within the art market and society at large. As these systems become more complex and entangled over time, Lund’s work evolves recursively, riffing off itself in confounding ways. In the Middle of Nowhere II, presented at Annka Kultys Gallery in London, picks up where In the Middle of Nowhere, exhibited earlier this year at Office Impart in Berlin, left off. This iteration drops us into the speculative office of an aspirational CEO whose unnamed company, much like the Yarner-equipped ghostwriters of Simak’s narrative, is struggling to keep pace with the ever-advancing technological stakes of this world. Potted plants and corporate office furniture frame the missing CEO’s art collection: a series of AI-generated tapestries, a single-channel video, and a four-channel screen-based wall work of automated affirmations.
In the Middle of Nowhere II takes us into a space of speculative fiction to reflect on the realities of AI in artistic production. Lund’s exhibition serves as a salient reminder that this relationship is a two-way street: the ways we prompt and prime machinic output inevitably has a kickback effect on broader notions of ‘human’ creativity and authorship, ideas that require vital revaluation in the present. By interrelating satire, speculation, and AI-influenced value production through corporate lore, In the Middle of Nowhere II problematises the distinctions previously held between human and machinic creative labor. It opens a window into a scenario where those relationships—and their material outputs are fully entangled, exposing the tensions and possibilities of AI as a creative collaborator.