Richard Sides

Richard Sides’ The Argument (2021) is an altered mirrored bathroom cabinet with the text „disinformation“ hand-written with permanent marker on its front. It draws on the artist’s installation-based multi-media practice which has repeatedly zoomed in on the anxieties and psychological operations of our digitally formatted culture, and the way we inhabit and share mental and physical spaces in these conditions. Imposing an ironic assertion of fakeness on the subjects and environments reflected in it, the work seems to bounce back narcissistic self-assertion and answers with a hackneyed, empty phrase which wouldn’t seem out of place in a public toilet. Considering the mechanics of neoliberal individualism, The Argument is perhaps more a vacated container or stage for different projections: Its interior is empty, only faintly lit with yellow fabric tape. As in his most recent film works, Sides’ practice is often dense with dark humor and a sharpened sensibility for the ambiguities and grotesques of a culture in which surveillance and hyper self-awareness coalesce.