'What is an end? One shudders perhaps. An end? Are there more than one? Is not the very question a violation of sorts?

A ruthless denuding? Should death be pushed so harshly into my awareness? Can she not wait? Is it not permissible to sleep?' Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation.

Cosmophobia is characterised by an irrational fear of the cosmos and our place within it, that the universe will impose its malicious will against us in the form of some astronomical catastrophe or other. What this exhibition attempts, is to think through the opportunity of hopelessness. The curatorial proposition is that these six young artists are best placed to respond to or be affected by the political, economic and ecological territories that neoliberalism has bequeathed to us. Starting from a zero point of nihilist speculation art must think beyond the contemporary towards a realm of collected objectiveness divorced from the humanist promise of individual freedom. Upon the death of such ideology and the dawning of an age in which politics must transform into a category capable of making the move beyond its previous neoliberal dominion, art has a renewed mandate to engender a new political imaginary.

Laura Gianetti © 2003-13