‘Achieving While Rome Burns’
John Ledger
The Little Known Gallery, Barnsley.
The exhibition has been inspired by one of the many unrealised projects pitched for the artist collective ‘the Retro Bar at the End of the Universe’ – this one in particular built on the theorist Byun Chul Han’s argument that in last few decades we have come to live in something he calls an ‘Achievement society’.
Han argues that we have begun to see our lives, and everything that circulates it as a project to achieve. Not only have we internalised the external oppressive forces of the state, but also the meritocratic paradigm that dominates our post-Thatcher society. Further more in age of social media we are all arguably ‘achievement’ subjects, perpetually stuck on project-building treadmills… and nobody more than the artist in the age of Instagram.
‘Achieving While Rome Burns’ came from my own understanding that whilst ever in an achievement society we never can truly reach towards our own humanity, and although we may desperately crave to connect with that which is beyond ourselves, to truly come together and help fight for the things that truly matter on this earth, we find ourselves locked inside achievement loops.
