Earlier this month, Season 4 Episode 6 celebrated the opening of i love you, you say / i know, they say, featuring Ahren Warner’s new body of velvet photographic works and complementary three-channel film. The exhibition will run through October 5th
Central to Ahren’s exhibition is the specter of Dan Bilzerian, American poker player, businessman, and shameless social media influencer. Curator Antonia Blocker observes:
Warner’s work reveals and revels in the critiqued yet persistent aesthetics of a particular cis-het fantasy of wealth, sex, and beauty, fuelled by social media. To make it, Warner seeks out the hyper-capitalist, self-indulgent, toxic spaces of party hostels, yoga retreats and co-living spaces, frequented by largely young, white Westerners…His work inserts a niggle of doubt into any sense of self-assured rising above. This may not be your fantasy, but you fantasise nonetheless.
Tomorrow Thursday September 19th, Warner will celebrate the concurrent launch of his debut novella, i will pay to make it bigger, out now on Prototype Publishing. In Warner’s novella, ‘you’ are the main character, compiling neurotic spreadsheets of the best ‘party destinations’ in Europe, launching a banal start-up, grieving a past relationship. You spend money on feelings, on the performance of your own persona, whilst you observe yourself with a detached sense of horror.
i will pay to make it bigger is also a photobook, a collection of images produced while Warner lived in a series of Thai ‘party hostels’. Although the photographs might seem to document intimate or ecstatic moments, they are in fact quite painstakingly, and artificially, constructed: composited and manipulated from multiple still frames of film footage to produce images that advertise the calculated artifice of their own hedonism, emotion and seemingly raw experience.
