NO, IT IS NOT; NOT ALWAYS
DT500mag | Arthur Sopin & Andreas Rod
London, 9 March – 31 April 2018
By Other Means Gallery, London
Film component: The Self-Fear, Dyspla International Moving Image Festival, Crypt Gallery, 14–18 March 2018
There is a particular tone emerging in contemporary art — part institutional exhaustion, part over-corrected clarity — where meaning is no longer delivered, but negotiated.
“No, It Is Not; Not Always” enters precisely at that fracture point.
Presented by DT500mag and conceived by Arthur Sopin and Andreas Rod, the project operates less as exhibition than as curatorial interference: a staged instability disguised as a photography show. Portraiture is not used here to represent subjects, but to test the conditions under which representation still holds authority at all.
The gallery does not function as a space. It functions as a signal disruption.
POST-CONCEPTUAL REALISM (OR ITS FAILURE)
The work situates itself in the uneasy terrain between post-conceptual photography and what might now be called post-realism: an image culture aware of its own exhaustion, yet still compelled to continue producing evidence.
There is no narrative progression. Only oscillation.
No resolution. Only repeated collapse of certainty under visual pressure.
If Venice Biennale logic still believes in “presentation,” this project is closer to its breakdown — where presentation becomes exposure, and exposure becomes a form of instability.
HE OPEN CALL AS ARTISTIC ENGINEERING
The open call “Are You a Meta-modernist?” produces not a selection, but a condition.
Over 150 submissions form a temporary ecosystem of practitioners operating across photography, performance, moving image, and hybrid documentation. What emerges is not a “scene” in the traditional sense, but something closer to a distributed authorship model — unstable, uncentralised, and deliberately resistant to hierarchy.
The exhibition does not curate outcomes.
It curates friction.
IPORTRAITURE AFTER CERTAINTY
The portrait, historically an instrument of identity, is here treated as a compromised technology.
Subjects appear neither fully constructed nor fully dissolved. Instead, they hover in a state of partial definition — as if identity itself has become allergic to completion.
Sopin describes the work as a refusal of stabilised reading. Rod frames it more directly:
“We are not producing images of people. We are producing evidence of uncertainty.”
In this shift, portraiture becomes less a visual genre and more an epistemological stress test.
ECCENTRICITY AS STRUCTURE, NOT DEVIATION
The central proposition is deceptively simple: eccentricity is not marginal.
It is structural.
What appears unstable is not the subject, but the system attempting to categorise it.
The exhibition repeatedly returns to this inversion — not as theme, but as operating logic. Meaning is not delivered through clarity, but through controlled misalignment.
CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT: INSTITUTIONAL FATIGUE + DIGITAL OVERLOAD
In a cultural moment defined by over-explanation — where everything must be contextualised, optimised, and rendered legible — No, It Is Not; Not Always refuses legibility as default.
Instead, it aligns itself with a broader international condition:
- institutional fatigue across European art systems
- post-internet image acceleration without narrative anchoring
- the return of ambiguity as aesthetic strategy rather than failure
- and a renewed interest in the image as unstable evidence
This is not nostalgia for opacity.
It is the recognition that clarity has become performative.
THE MOVING IMAGE EXTENSION
The Self-Fear, presented at the Dyspla International Moving Image Festival, extends the project into temporal fragmentation.
Here, identity is not represented but destabilised across duration — a shifting refusal to resolve into character, story, or psychological coherence.
The film does not conclude. It simply stops insisting.
CLOSING POSITION
“No, It Is Not; Not Always” does not propose meaning.
It tests whether meaning still survives contact with contemporary image culture.
What remains is not resolution, but residue — a curated instability that refuses to settle into explanation, interpretation, or institutional comfort.
It is not an exhibition about uncertainty.
It is uncertainty, staged with precision.
And then — without resolution — it exits the frame.
https://www.artrabbit.com/events/no-it-is-not-not-always-the-selffear-downtown-500-magazine
East London March 2018
© by Arthur Sopin and Andreas Rod
#dt500mag 