What is the origin of life? What does the future hold? Could humanity somehow be related to mysterious, non-human creatures? These are just some of the questions raised by the work of Helsinki-based, British artist Joey Holder. Debuting in France at Paris+ par Art Basel, Holder’s Cryptid (2023) will feature as a solo display presented by Seventeen, London. The work continues the artist’s intriguing multimedia practice that straddles architecture, sculpture, sound, and film.
Holder’s art is based on extensive research across digital technology and science. ‘I wanted to be a marine biologist as a child, but decided to study art instead,’ she tells me via Zoom. ‘It seemed that it would also allow me to explore my interest in science.’ At Goldsmiths College in London, where she studied in the late 2010s, her art became both rooted in the aesthetic and conceptual language of 1990s Net Art and invested in the post-internet movement of the late 2000s and early 2010s, which reflected the impact of the internet on society. ‘The notion that art could mutate through digital networks and not only be shown in a white cube fascinated me,’ she explains, referring to her early experiments. ‘This possibility to break down hierarchies – the way that a work of art could, in fact, be a found image, for instance – gave me a sense of freedom within my practice.’
Throughout her oeuvre, Holder unpicks set stratifications in form; conceptually, her immersive installations create speculative realities that question and undermine Western, techno-capitalist structures. The artist sees such forces taking shape in the realm of science, and her synesthetic environments address issues including eel migration, animal reproduction, and synthetic biology: Misnomers are unearthed and exposed to form a more complex, fluid, and hybrid viewpoint that deflates the commonly held divisions between nature and culture.
Comprising a series of prints, sculptures, sound, and a six-channel video, Holder’s new installation explores these ideas through a focus on the cryptids of the work’s title. Defined as a species, cryptids – examples of which include the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti – are creatures from popular culture whose existence is disputed by mainstream science. Following the work’s premiere in Paris, it will be presented at X Museum in Beijing and Two Queens in Leicester, adding to the growing list of prestigious venues at which Holder has exhibited in recent years, including the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Transmediale, and the Venice Biennale.
In blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, the cryptids help to examine, as Holder explains, ‘the Western scientific project that sought to categorize, taxonomize, and systematize the wider world’. She adds that science still has not classified many animals and plants. ‘It is said that 86% of all plants and 91% of [creatures] in the sea are yet to be named and catalogued.’ Our relationship to other animal species, grown out of a belief in the supremacy of humanity over nature, is reassessed as rooted in the violent mechanisms of colonialism, which started in the 15th century, when such theories emerged.
As a counterpoint, Holder explores our inextricable interconnectedness to the world that surrounds us: ‘I wanted to investigate the idea that these seemingly alien-like species are, in fact, very much linked to us; without them we wouldn’t be here,’ she explains. ‘They are probably closer to us than ever.’ Further exploring this, Holder also points to various theories on the origins of life, a common thread that runs through her work. Thoughts on the possibility that humans originated from water – the aquatic ape theory, for instance, suggests that our earliest ancestor was an amphibian-like creature that roamed the ancient oceans, while the theory of cymatics asks whether life may have started through sound – challenge the Western human-centric position.
In this sense, Holder’s complex installations transport the viewer from the microscopic to the cosmic, where time and space collapse in a process of self-questioning. The installation serves as a gateway through which to escape from the system in which it is presented. ‘I’m interested in the idea of transcendence, and in creating a total and immersive space that lifts the viewer from an art-world context,’ she says. ‘The structure at the center of the installation and the prints on the wall function as a kind of portal.’
Holder’s process also questions the common notion of the artist as an outcast whose ‘genius’ reaches beyond society’s fabric. ‘The starting point to my work is always a conversation,’ she says. ‘From the research stage to the production of the work itself, my practice is very much informed by discussions with a wide range of individuals from different fields, such as scientists and researchers, as well as other artists and designers.’
The collaboration that underpins her work also manifests through collective efforts she has established in the past few years. Projects like Chaos Magic, an exhibition space she set up in Nottingham in 2017, and SPUR, an online educational platform that supports digital practices, take community-building as a central focus. This rhizomatic approach unleashes ever-evolving and unexpected approaches and defines her practice as one which seeks to form new worlds, anchored in both the real and the fictitious, that offer new possibilities of meaning and living.
Joey Holder is represented by Seventeen, London. Cryptid will be on view in the Galeries Émergentes sector at Paris+ par Art Basel.
Juliette Desorgues is a writer and curator based in Paris.
Published on September 19, 2023.
Captions for full-bleed videos : Excerpts of Joey Holder, Cryptid, 2023 trailer (details). Courtesy of Seventeen.