Transformer: A Rebirth Of Wonder

Art Allows You To Access Worlds That Aren’t Your Own

The experience of consciousness-altering through ritual, dance, meditation, hallucinogenics, dreaming or art-making is seen across cultures throughout history. We live in transformative times. The first mobile-phone call was made in 1973, catalysing the pace of technology to the speed of light. Since then, many premonitions drawn from science fiction have come to pass. We have sleepwalked into a state of saturation and overload – so how do we awaken? The artists in Transformer look to the past, the future and into a Rebirth of Wonder. Through shamanism, technology, speculative realism, energy transference, intimacy and healing, the singular becomes multiple and prismatic, the binary becomes defunct. Each artist is a powerful mediator of their community and culture, using storytelling and poetics to construct new narratives and widen our field of vision. They are world-makers, inviting us to step into a series of highly authored, staged environments, between which are rest spots and psychic time-outs that allow the viewer to reflect on their perception of, and presence in, these worlds within worlds.

A Rebirth of Wonder is borrowed from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem I Am Waiting, a metaphor for hope within endless anticipation for change. Written after the second world war, the poem is romantic in its longing, beat generation in its seeking, and modern in its self-awareness. The feeling of stasis in I Am Waiting, in which Ferlinghetti asks for removal of the destructive forces of culture to no avail, is at the heart of today’s social crisis. His Rebirth of Wonder is the moment when the waiting ends and a psychic renaissance of wonder transforms society and tips us into a new epoch. This is the mirror to Plato’s cave. The dreamers are above ground, being tracked and surveilled, their data mined. Meanwhile, below the surface, within Transformer, the true nature of reality flickers beyond the shadows between alchemical realms, walls and worlds, in the liminal recesses of the multi-dimensional imaginings of these artists. This is where we can find true connection: where we escape to commune, contemplate and conduct emergent ideas and identities.

Transformer takes place across the sprawling subterranean world of The Temple, located at 180 The Strand, intersected by London’s main ley lines and on the edge of an ancient holy well at St Clement Danes. In this sense, the exhibition is a contemporary architecture – and archaeology – a negotiation of a space in flux, an environment in the constant process of (re)invention, a metaphor for the shifting social conditions above ground. Beyond the core exhibition, as part of the Alchemical Realms live programme, there will be related performances, talks, workshops and community-based actions that will inspire further discussion, participation and development of the ideas inherent in the works. Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder welcomes the complexities in the discussion – the diversity of voices, positions and feelings that come with unravelling conversations of identity, representation and (self-) image. By doing so it considers how coming together – sharing, bonding, taking action, building alliances and showing compassion – is shaping new narratives to connect, and effect change.