FRAGILE ECONOMIES
JASMINE PAJDAK & EMMA BANG
02 – 16 DECEMBER, 2020
For the final Open Call commissioned INTHEWINDOW exhibition of 2020, we present a vital sculptural installation examining our relationship with material and the industrial world from artists Jasmine Pajdak and Emma Bang.
Emma Bang (Danish artist, b.1989) and Jasmine Pajdak (British artist, b.1987), have a collaborative practice that seeks to make a connection with the natural world whilst acknowledging our increasing physical impact and estrangement from it. Pajdak and Bang, met on the Print MA at the Royal College of Art in 2017. Since graduating in 2019 they have begun an extensive research project that explores milk both as material and as myth, entitled Welcome to the Pleasure Dairy. Fragile Economies is the first presentation of their findings to date.
Fragile Economies explores our increasing disconnection from the material world. This sculptural installation uses milk as both matter and provocation to talk around ideas of intimacy, exploitation and precarity.
Throughout time, and common to most cultures, milk has been both sustenance and symbol - from mother’s milk to the milky way. But it is also a contentious story of exploitation that has oppressed both women and animals. Commercialisation has depersonalised and suppressed its intimate potency.
During the first UK lockdown the dairy industry was in crisis with farmers predicting that 5 million gallons of milk would be wasted this year. Artists Bang and Pajdak decided to utilise this surplus and create a material that has a strong link to not just the everyday, but to the lived, its surface collecting and registering the traces of the passing world, simultaneously provoking and repelling contact.
Fragile Economies proposes a critique of the mono-culture which despises welfare and thrives on precarity. Trapped within an industrial structure the animal has become disembodied, its udders commodified.
– PAJDAK & BANG, 2020
Throughout time, and common to most cultures, milk has been both sustenance and symbol - from mother’s milk to the milky way. But it is also a contentious story of exploitation that has oppressed both women and animals. Commercialisation has depersonalised and suppressed its intimate potency.
During the first UK lockdown the dairy industry was in crisis with farmers predicting that 5 million gallons of milk would be wasted this year. Artists Bang and Pajdak decided to utilise this surplus and create a material that has a strong link to not just the everyday, but to the lived, its surface collecting and registering the traces of the passing world, simultaneously provoking and repelling contact.
Fragile Economies proposes a critique of the mono-culture which despises welfare and thrives on precarity. Trapped within an industrial structure the animal has become disembodied, its udders commodified.
– PAJDAK & BANG, 2020
Emma Bang (Danish artist, b.1989) and Jasmine Pajdak (British artist, b.1987), have a collaborative practice that seeks to make a connection with the natural world whilst acknowledging our increasing physical impact and estrangement from it. Pajdak and Bang, met on the Print MA at the Royal College of Art in 2017. Since graduating in 2019 they have begun an extensive research project that explores milk both as material and as myth, entitled Welcome to the Pleasure Dairy. Fragile Economies is the first presentation of their findings to date.
