Jack Williams, Curated hatred

We invite you to the opening, which will take place on 13 November at 6:00 PM at Bulvary.

Curated Hatred is an exhibition of video and text-based artworks which investigates the state of discourse on the social media platform X, specifically looking at posts from ‘mainstream media’ outlets which are critical of the far-right political ideology and the comments left on these posts.

Through a novel adaptation of erasure poetry (a form of constrained writing) and experimental font design the artworks depict the extreme rejection and obliteration of oppositional ideas. These fonts are animated within a video installation in order to enact the ‘cognitive erasure’ that occurs when a far-right adherent encounters identity-threatening information online, with only the febrile comments from far-right sympathisers being readable and accepted.

These artworks look at how political ideology and the activation of ‘high arousal’ emotions in extreme online spaces results in a form of constrained writing, where written communication among the ideologically entrenched is reduced to obscenities and unwavering anger with no dissenting views or diversity of opinions present. 

This exhibition will therefore reframe constrained writing not as an emancipatory and niche experimental writing technique, but as something practised by adherents of the far-right on X through the constraints of emotion and ideology.

This exhibition is the culmination of a PhD project undertaken at the doctoral school of the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Art and Design in Wrocław under the supervision of dr hab. Przemysław Pintal.

Opening times:
14/11 & 21/11 (Friday): 11:00 – 15:00
15/11 & 22/11 (Saturday): 14:00 – 19:00
16/11 & 23/11 (Sunday): 14:00 – 19:00
17/11 & 24/11 (Monday): 11:00 – 15:00
20/11 & 27/11 (Thursday): 18:30 – 21:00