‘False Friends’ was an exhibition at The Function Suite, 25 West Ham Lane, London, E15 4PH.

It was open for one evening 

It Featured Marc Blazel, Hannah Cass-Simpson, Edward Kay, Alan Michael, Sam Plagerson, Steven Gee, Klara Vith, Joe Highton, William Leach, Gillies Adamson-Semple

‘ False Friends’ was an exhibition considering the shared languages between contemporary practice, and consumer culture in 2020. Placing image based practices in dialogue with artists considering commodification, retail and idiosyncrasies in contemporary society.

In linguistics, a ‘false friend’ is a shortened version of the expression ‘false friend of the translator’, referring to words in different languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning. Reaching out for the familiarity of a similar sounding word in most cases can be semantically treacherous, but the brain always reaches for what it knows.

In the same sense, we live in a culture of familiarity - saturated with imagery, and more than ever, as with language, there is a disrupted sense of lineage. Things no longer seem exactly familiar, but ever present. Déjà vu, translated back to English as ‘already seen’, is a phenomenon that still cannot be fully explained, an overwhelming sense of familiarity with something that shouldn't be familiar at all.

Fredric Jameson writes on Postmodernity as “the total saturation of cultural space by the image”, this complete permeation of images logically means that everywhere is an aesthetic experience, removing any autonomy. Everything is now fully translated into the visible and the culturally familiar, “aesthetic attention," he says, "finds itself transferred to the life of perception as such", a "new life of postmodern sensation," in which "the perceptual system of late capitalism" experiences everything from shopping to all forms of leisure as aesthetic. We live in a state of becoming, of having been, and therefore changing.