Cement Fondu celebrates Halloween season with Warm Bodies, a lively and haunting exhibition that challenges us to think and feel outside of our comfort zones.

Just as horror movies and post-apocalyptic fiction reflect the real fears and anxieties of the societies in which they’re made, the selected artists upend convention with hybrid art forms and mutating identities, and confront us with the powerful aesthetics of rot, mutation and destruction.

Tropes of body horror and technological meltdown appear throughout the show as visitors encounter body-popping zombies, the gender politics of slime and B-movies remade as .GIFs.  Visceral forms and experiences feature across cinematic projection and ceramics, analogue photography and Black Death Metal music, live dance and digital glitch textiles.

In addition, UK-based artist Adham Faramawy will take over the Art Store, Cement Fondu’s mezzanine will become a haunted house following a week-long social project between KARI indigenous youth group and award-winning US artist and educator Jaimie Warren, and Laetitia Olivier-Gargano will fill the Project Space with odd objects and animations that incite wonder and repulsion.

In this era when truth is mummified and fiction reigns, and when the death of analogue meets an impending doom of technological unknowns, these artists ask if we’re living in our own ‘End Time’ scenario? Embracing this creeping feeling, the exhibition also demonstrates that horror can offer hope. Interspersed with unexpected moments of humor and redemption – like the apocalypse novel and film of the same name – Warm Bodies suggests that facing our fears now might be critical to avoiding a future we dread.

Images

Safdar Ahmed, Hazeen, Black Death Metal Band, 2015. Photo Alex Wisser. Installation Images: Anna Kucera