London, UK: Trouble In Outer Heaven: Portable Ops Plus takes the fanaticism of fandom as its starting point, and responds to the influence of the video game franchise Metal Gear Solid, initiated by developer Hideo Kojima in 1987. The exhibition runs from 15 September until 31 October at Lake Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries and admission is free.
Curated and including work by Jamie Sutcliffe, the show features Larry Achiampong, Joseph Buckley, Kitty Clarke, Sam Keogh, Hardeep Pandhal and Adam Sinclair with a programme for young people by The Diamond Dogs Educational Unit, Uma Breakdown, Petra Szemán, and Zara Truss Giles.
For nearly 30 years, Metal Gear and its promotion of ‘stealth’ as a fundamental mechanic of play has explored a world of off-shore para-states and private task forces charged with wresting power from the world’s collapsing democracies. These prescient themes are encapsulated by the game’s martial utopia, ‘Outer Heaven’, an ambiguous separatist state of renegade soldiers and mercenaries.
Reading Metal Gear’s ideas of play, service, and community against the strange uses to which its iconography was put during the lead-up to the 2016 US Presidential election, this exhibition confronts both the ecstasies and problems of fandom and asks if critical counter-languages might be found within the intricate traceries of its peculiar brand of speculative fiction.
Cosplaying its affection for Metal Gear’s richness and absurdity, the exhibition brings together a coterie of artists whose early encounters with the game’s unique vision and poetics continue to influence their worldview as opportunities for thinking through positions of de-colonial critique, ludic defiance, and anti-fascist resistance.
At a time when reactionary perspectives bristle uncomfortably against the permissive circumstances of play, the show asks whether play is still the preserve of fantasy and if this really is all just a game.
Lake Gallery, Southwark Park Galleries, 1 Park Approach, Southwark Park, SE16 2UA from 15 September until 31 October. Admission: Free. Tel: 020 7237 1230 – www.southwarkparkgalleries.org
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