Artists

Béla Feldberg, Jiajia Zhang

Press release

People are afraid to merge1, yet they stroll through the city, engulfed by its eloquent urban architecture. Illuminated by moving billboards, flickering screens, rampant advertisements, cutouts, leaflets, and various campaigns—they rush into malls and stores for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps they are seeking escape, or simply looking to warm up and enjoy the comfort of in-real-life window shopping; we all inadvertently fall into certain looping traps.

Immuneless and expectant of something special, yet trivial—something close to nothing—the agony of rife branding pokes even more insidiously from our phones. Every app seems infested with a framework of advertisements, infiltrating every moment of our daylight and nightlife.

In one thorny 2020 theory, the idea of branding or marketing oneself approaches a kind of self-prostitution. As articulated in original words: “While everyone’s personal brand becomes monetizable, the lines between prostitution and self-promotion are blurred. In 2020, everyone’s a performer, an artist, an escort, and a social worker,” Natasha Stagg allegedly claimed before quitting Instagram and smoking for good.

Let’s place a cryptic theory into our constructed reality: both, Jiajia Zhang’s and Béla Feldberg’s works at Damien & The Love Guru in Brussels slam a notoriety of references. Their works harness and study levels of social ennui—That of numbness produced by an industry obsessed with extraction and luxury, the marketing so pervasive, it warps the exterior architecture, and eventually fucks with (our) urban isolation. —You never get to feel lonely while you’re browsing through stuff online. You’ll never get to feel lonely while ordering online. As a result, you emerge from utter exposure either way, confronted with either too much or far too little.