Tasman Richardson Kali Yuga

Toronto-based artist Tasman Richardson’s Kali Yuga is an audiovisual experience that takes viewers through an immersive psychological journey—they are invited to navigate the exhibition’s dark pathways relying only on the video works to light their way. Incorporating analogue monitors and digital projections, six maximalist media pieces are carefully arranged in nearly symmetrical formation to showcase Richardson’s technological ingenuity and sculptural sensibility.

The works presented comprise a combination of content pillaged from the Internet, pre-recorded playbacks, and live video feeds that produce hauntingly decayed, surveilled, and teleported reflections of each gallery visitor. Richardson’s installation manipulates the means of seeing and being seen, highlighting the complexity of transmitting one’s own image through technology. In an age of spectacle, he critiques the artifice of (self-) images by underlining the parasitic relationships they encourage between people.

The title of the exhibition, translating to “The Age of Vice,” refers to a Hindu apocalypse tale. While dreaming of our universe and all of the people within it, a deity is suddenly stirred from sleep. Upon their awakening, shared reality is destroyed, ready to be rebuilt, anew. Richardson’s Kali Yuga draws parallels between British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the contemporary media landscape, and this ancient Hindu myth, concluding that so long as the deity sleeps, our world remains a fragmented feedback loop of hyperconnectivity, self-obsession, and alienation.

Curated by Shauna Jean Doherty