There are two rooms to the exhibition – the operating room and the recovery room. In the operating room there is a hospital bed whose mattress is wipeable plastic. There are small hairy objects in kidney trays beside it. Mandrake root and Eraserhead. A sticker on a machine at the bed’s base advises against smoking: ‘a lit cigarette on the mattress surface can cause leakage of the pumped air’. A small light indicates inflation is set to ‘mid’ between ‘soft’ and ‘firm’. Something is not right. Nearby on the floor, a ritual or ‘scientific’ area is demarcated by multiple reams of kitchen roll, unravelled from the centre to form a circle. The paper is grubby and there are household items on it such as you might find in a garage. It appears as if someone abandoned the DIY esoteric YouTube instructional video halfway through. This eery apocalypse lobby feel is supported in the next room by a film playing on mute, a tarot spread left out on a bed, headphones narrating the operating procedure like a demented intercom, disembodied.  

Back to the first room. The body is not just imagined in terms of medical procedure, albeit one that involves inserting a meme directing into the patient’s brain – an ode to pre-CGI body-horror – but becomes a lucid dream of technology and nature in Kinke Kooi’s day-bright hallucination Growing the Seeds of Love, which radiates with the conviction of epiphany against the infirmary green of the gallery walls. Sweetpeas, pearls, tassels and napkin-like lilies map with plush chambers, glowing crevices, a tiny in-set drawing room and, nested at its centre, a contraceptive pill blister pack, the pills themselves pearl-like – part of the gang. It’s Big Pharma reimagined by Angela Carter. Meanwhile, Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto haunts Minjeong An’s intricately diagrammatic Self-Portrait and Six-Membered Family Portrait.

Next to Kinke Kooi’s work is that of aLifveForms WÄCHTERIN (I) and WÄCHTERIN (II) in which deconstructed buggies are splayed on the walls in shonky rune formations. Sections of these rune-buggies have a glancing resemblance to symbols for fertility and divine protection. They have a writing-on-the-wall urgency, inflected with a pink-wheeled bodega buggy charisma. From birth onto death. Katya Novitskova’s Death Times is a thick pock-marked work, featuring a mummified skeleton in fetal position, hands to skull in mock horror, as if from a Pompeii of the future. At its base the words ‘death times’ are printed droll sans serif. The artist has carefully filled in the work’s dents with pearlescent nail polish – a low-fi kintsugi, or, self-care/gussying up the end times. Jack Jubb’s Denim Dreams is a vaseline-lens flannel postcard of mutant wraparound sunglasses (hyper-ergonomic design featuring amphibian fins), all dissolving in clouds. Tumblr floating on bennies. Like the scenario it describes, MemePlex™ has been inserted with a narrative artifact from an earlier Omsk Social Club piece The Wet Alter. Therefore, MemePlex™ is preoccupied with ideas of determinism and free will.