If you go down to Pembroke Street today, you’ll never believe your eyes. For there you will find four towering Teletubbies dressed in police SWAT gear.

The nightmarish apparitions of the children’s TV characters are guarding a space modelled on the Big Apple’s Zuccotti Park, the site of the Occupy Wall Street protest camp in 2011. These unnerving Teletubbies form part of a dystopian environment called Freedom created by the New York-based artist Josh Kline.

For his exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, Kline has taken his Freedom installation and expanded it into a larger, immersive environment incorporating sculpture, video, and architectural elements. The installation was first exhibited, to critical acclaim, at the New Museum Triennial, in New York, in February 2015, but this is the first time the work has been shown in Europe.

Freedom marks the first solo exhibition in a public gallery by Josh Kline, whose work considers ways in which present day humanity has been transformed and commodified. It reacts to real world events, not theory, yet it references theory and is concerned with Posthumanism.

Kline explains: “I go with the simple definition from sci-fi novels: people who are no longer human. I mostly associate it with the relentless push to squeeze more productivity out of workers – turning people into reliable, always-on, office appliances.”

Through an exploration of the digitisation of identity, the voluntary and involuntary dissolution of privacy, and the political consequences of human existence under such an imposed regime, Kline addresses a perceived era that began with the 2008 financial crisis and the fate of the viral political movements that have arisen in its wake. He describes this work as “the politics of the future”.

He adds: “Freedom begins a new cycle of installations that I plan to produce over the next five years, that will explore possible trajectories of the 21st century; potential futures. While many of the later works in the cycle will be more explicitly sci-fi, this first episode is rooted in the present and recent past.

Freedom is set in the soft dystopia we know and inhabit. Across these years, waves of grassroots political activism have washed through American society, the most newsworthy of which have been the 2008 Obama campaign, the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and now the demonstrations ignited by events in Ferguson, Missouri. Freedom looks at political speech in our time and poses questions about its possibilities and uses, in a society where speech has been transformed into entertainment capital.”

Kline is part of an emerging generation of artists who are both interested in Posthumanism and work with the visual language and technology of the present (the vocabulary of commercial media, new technologies such as 3D printing, and perishable substances).

Ciara Moloney, curator of exhibitions & projects, said: “We are delighted by the critical reception of Josh Kline’s exhibition. It’s been exciting to see our visitors engaging with Kline’s powerful videos and installations.

“The 3D printed sculptures of doughnuts have proved particularly popular with audiences.”

Where and when
Josh Kline – Freedom continues at Modern Art Oxford, Pembroke Street, until October 18. A series of events accompany this free show.
modernartoxford.org.uk