Someone asked about wireless earphones that could be used in a 15 minute sauna. A sharp intake of breath from all the Finns, and this startling response:
We really should be wiped off this planet.
The other thing that had me feeling really judgy was this article in the Guardian:
‘I was asked to find a volunteer for an air pollution campaign in Lahore – I couldn’t find anyone’
The title and hook are offensive and outright misleading in a way that the Guardian and the journalist should be ashamed of. The request was for activists to be sitters during multiple 4-hour sessions requiring preparation, for 230 pen and ink studies that would be displayed in public places (and at least the one portrait that emerged was shirtless). The piece was about the Lahore Biennale but the only artist mentioned was an English one. In fact, of the six people named the only Pakistani was the one complaining that other Pakistanis wouldn’t sit for portraits (though to be fair, it was clear he had no idea how his quotes would look in the context of the piece). The piece itself was extraordinarily confused, ending with a complete non-sequitur about Kashmir (I imagine because the no-name NGO that placed it works on peacebuilding.
I did actually know Dryden slightly when in London, and liked him and much of his work, but the installation and project itself are horrendously patronising. Portraits of people breathing, to “induce a heightened consciousness about the act of breathing” and so, as the representative of the science/art communication charity put it, to build “a growing collective of individuals with each new city, striving for clean air” – these are clearly not people who have breathed through winter in Lahore.