E X I L E curated by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf
„The DEPRESSIVA Revolutions“

In her films, video installations, paintings, sculptures and performances, Dutch artist S.M. van der Linden (born 1952) deals with female role models and the power and representation structures of a capitalist society that is constantly concerned with self-optimization. In particular the artist is interested in how the body, sexual attraction and romantic relationships are fetishized as status symbols and transformed into commodities. In van der Linden’s work, the “economy of narcissistic reward” is a central motif – a system in which individuals are motivated to perform and consume and compete by external validation, admiration and status, often at the expense of real social or emotional bonds and genuinely felt empathy.

Van der Linden’s narcissistic, perfectionist cosmos pays homage to the most diverse forms of the entertainment industry: to Disney’s early cartoons from the late 1920s such as Silly Symphonies, and his groundbreaking feature films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Fantasia (1940), to vogue and voguing, models and runways, commercials and Busby Berkeley musicals from the 1930s and 1940s, jingles and muzak. In her trilogy of depressants (Depressants, 2010, Subterranean Breathing, 2010 and Skype, 2011), van der Linden addresses the after-effects of narcissistic overdoses: cold turkey, depression, panic, paralysis – which she stages like screwball comedies or as slapstick chamber plays.

The Depressiva Revolutions combines parts of the Depressiva trilogy with “low-tech” animations from the late 1990s, to which the Berlin band Stereo Total composed the soundtrack. Other parts of the exhibition are screen prints and drawings created from the 1990s to the 2000s, in which van der Linden deals with pornography, fetish and sex work. The former student of the Amsterdam Rietveld Academie combines influences from Constructivism, the Russian avant-garde and Art Nouveau with the aesthetics of acid art and psychedelic posters. This combination of strictly formal, modern and pop-cultural influences can also be found in abstract drawings and prints that are reminiscent of calligraphy and notation and could also be inspired by Disney’s Fantasia, post-war abstraction or Sixties graphics.

The exhibitions’s title The Depressiva Revolutions alludes to the many sequels to the Matrix films. The Matrix Revolutions is the third, poorly reviewed instalment of the Matrix films released in 2003, which began with 1999’s Matrix and continued with Matrix Reloadedin May 2003. Matrix Resurrections was then released in cinemas in 2021. Throughout the series, a group of rebels fight against machines and AI that breed all of humanity as slaves and food and keep people under control through a computer simulation, the Matrix.

Various conspiracy theories of the extreme American right, which compare the global, neoliberal system with the Matrix from which we must “awaken”, also stem from the context of the Matrix. The Depressiva Revolutions is the feminist-queer meme version of this Q-Anon idea. The title ties in with the left-wing slogan “Depressed? It Might Be Political!”, which, in the spirit of van der Linden’s art, speaks against the pathologization and instead for the politicization of depression.