Marsyas Returns
at Le Crédac Credakino: A screening program as part of Roy Könhke’s solo exhibition.
Artists: Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Nina Davies, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah
Curator: Caroline Honorien
Screening & exhibition opening: 18 January / 5pm to 9pm.
The exhibition runs from 19 January to 23 March
Through and against the skin, our relationship with the world becomes palpable. The epidermal envelope is at once a surface of embodiment, a resistant membrane, and a permeable frontier. In the physical or virtual world, skin transforms bodies into interfaces that remind us of colonial history, open portals to ancestral memories, or dialogue with algorithms. This video program questions how bodies negotiate power, dismantle borders, and reclaim their agency. Each video reveals the skin as a complex terrain where flesh, technological topologies, and memory converge and collide to renew our approach to the body.
Le Crédac La Manufacture des Œillets 1 place Pierre Gosnat, 94200 Ivry‑sur‑Seine.
Google Map.
Wednesday to Friday: 2pm to 6pm / Saturday and Sunday: 2pm to 7pm
Closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, and public holidays
Free admission
Stills: _GOD_MODE_, Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, 2023
Commissioned by Wellcome Collection
Curatorial note
In Greek mythology, Marsyas is a flute player whose two-pipe instrument can imitate human voices, laughter, and tears. The talent of this musician, also renowned for his ability to cure illness, reaches Apollo and sparks his jealousy. After a duel, the god has Marsyas flayed alive. Marsyas' naked body thus becomes the theatre of punishment, a site where power and flesh meet.
It is through and against the skin that our relationship to the world becomes palpable. The epidermis is a surface that can be read or scrutinized. It is both resistant and porous. Marsyas Returns explores this organ as an interface where memory, technology, imposition, and reclamations constantly redefine themselves.
Each video of the program examines the tension between the body, control, and the quest for self-determination. These works delve into worlds where the real and the virtual intertwine, both to assert power and to create spaces of resistance. Worlds in which the ancestral metamorphoses of the divine Anansi spider, glitches, and video-game-inspired gestures and dances explore and subvert systems of control—eugenics, predictive technologies, gender norms—while at the same time opening up new breaches.
In video games, the skin — the customizable appearance — embodies this ambivalence. A marker of identity, distinction, and even value, it is at once an expression of subjectivity, belonging, and the commodification of the self.
The return of Marsyas, the revenge of the satyr whose tortured body's fibers let in the light of day, invites us to explore the skin in all its dimensions—real and virtual—as a site of experimentation where narratives and bodies intersect.
Video works:
Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, _GOD_MODE_
2023, colour video with sound, 11min 52sec
‘But can't we shapeshift too? Work together to undermine these fantasies, to create a new game engine? To break the webs of myths held in zeros and ones, dollars and pounds.’
Here, everything begins with Galton and the crinkled skin of the fingers that made fingerprinting possible. GOD_MODE by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy explores the legacy of eugenics and colonial pseudosciences in contemporary power structures and tools. Delving into artifacts from museum collections, as well as images and metaphors drawn from video games (where "GOD_MODE" is a state of invincibility), the duo weaves a critique of systems of oppression, with science and technology as their vehicles. Juxtaposing personal and political narrative, as well as poetic discourse, the film questions who determines the value or terms of survival. It imagines a collective uprising—the "revolt of the NPCs" (non-player characters)—to disrupt the structures, write new narratives, and rethink bodies.
Nina Davies, Precursing
2023, solour video with sound, 11min 12sec
‘Prediction is never wholly truthful [...] And also, a predictive technology can never be liable for something’
Within a system where technological growth is accelerating, it is crucial to consider how new technologies for storytelling affect fields that rely on accuracy. AI is used across industries like finance, law, and insurance to predict futures, while also detecting ghosts on social media. Focusing on predictive frameworks trained in fictional spaces like video games, Precursing considers TikTok NPC dance trends as a plea to escape a present determined by predictive technology.
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah, IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS
2023, colour video with sound, 29min 29sec
IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE! TAKE THIS is a CGI film featuring ever-changing cinematic sequences from an imaginary video game which follows the ambiguous “hero” undergoing numerous metamorphoses. Combining fantasy, erotica and body horror, the film unravels and challenges the amped-up constructed masculinity that video game avatars embody as well as the associated idealistic connotations of progress, growth and transformation. Here external worlds merge with internal ones, the body’s selfhood untangles from surface and emotions flood in technicolour form.
