For his first solo show, Nàstio Mosquito presents works at Ikon that undermine and disrupt our perceptions of both the artist and continental divisions. In the first room two video works play off our given readings, using the body and voice of the artist as a vehicle to occupy and undermine. In ’I am Naked’ a small wall-based monitor relays the artist frenetically eyeing the camera filmed in night vision. Mosquito makes a series of pronouncements intoned in nationless patios informing us, with icy totality, that artists are ‘placed’ ‘inserted into spaces’ to see if they can make it. In the presence of this work ‘Acts’ projects a monumental stadium show, in which Mosquito’s silhouette is doubled, distorted, sings ‘Purple Rain’ while enhanced by a digital hailstorm, then drops into a vortex of psychedelic overlaps. The sound throughout the gallery is multi-layered, leading to a growing awareness of other works on the periphery that inhabit your perception of the work being viewed. You hear statements, relayed in laconic drawling Russian accented English, that lead to ‘Nàstia’s Manifesto’ a floor-based circular projection that invites you to ‘Get Paid Big Money’ to be ‘Hypocritical, ironic and do not give a fuck’. The force of ongoing conflict and crisis inhabit the work. The rhetoric of a politician’s speech becomes a vehicle for opposing states of self. The ways in which continental Africa endures as a vehicle for projection, desire, violence and corruption are dissected in ‘Fuck Africa remix’. While in ‘3 Continents’ Mosquito asserts that he has bought debt heavy Europe and America as a takeover of the colour pink, while offering sardonic reassurance that it’s really nothing to worry about.
The video based work of ‘ifind, iabuse to simplify, icustomise, objective mine, iyou what see’ (2010) cuts and splices a series of globally familiar Google image searches, colliding the banalities of the universe, faith, tangibility and trust with the force of political will. The resulting collage reproduced as wallpaper, ‘Ending Bad People is Ambiguity’ you are invited to listen to one of two soundtracks while seated, one ‘The belief experience,’ the other ‘Don’t always believe what you hear’. What is exposed by the soundtrack is the moment when Mosquito’s words stop. At this point the images used are released and float into freefall. Away from rhetoric they become feral, incomprehensible and banal. Empty as clouds the images float. You realise how much you invest in Mosquito as author to guide you through a narrative, to create the territory that you occupy. You realise how little you think about the ways in which language creates a visual rhetoric, how both word and image are gullible to being induced into saying other things. The tightly controlled cynicism of the works’ language has a depth that startles, it makes you unsure and becomes a conduit to a series of internal questions. Walking back through the first gallery the text on the wall states ‘Illustration as addiction, you are one more bow yet, you are one more’. With this, Mosquito winks at the viewers departing from the gallery into the image world of unregulated mass cultural commercial racketeering.
