waterside contemporary is pleased to announce the inaugural show in its new gallery space in Hoxton.

They don’t know why, but they keep doing it brings together six artists whose practices reflect on the role of ideology in a post-ideological landscape.

Ideologies structure and simplify reality. They emerge where the Symbolic is not able to adequately translate the Real. We resort to using simplification, brand historical concepts, we give names to movements and phenomena.

The artists, aware of these mechanisms, reject the obvious, doubting the potential of ideologised thought and production. Working in paint, installation and video, they expand into the post-participatory, the post-media, and chart the past-punk and the past-colonial.

These artistic narratives are based on the overbearing here and now. Spilling out of context, the artists produce hallucinatory newspaper headlines, trash baroque icons, surreal minefields and post-apocalyptic barbecues. Faced with this fracture of the Real, we are as viewers released from the circumstantial, and are drawn into a world of the unconscious artistic gesture.

The resulting aesthetic/commodity experience illustrates an ultimate paradox of production: the artists’ rejection of the institutionalised fuels the creation of new ideologies. They don’t know why, but they keep doing it.

Exhibition curated by Piotr Sikora and Pierre d'Alancaisez.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The exhibition is accompanied by a large-scale publishing intervention by Javier Rodriguez, distributed at London newsstands and during Frieze Art Fair.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

9 October - 5 November 2011

A fully illustrated catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition, containing essays by Pierre d'Alancaisez, Aleksander Hudzik, Piotr Sikora and Stach Szabłowski. Available from the gallery at £5 including p&p.