To Plead is to beg, testify, confess, perform sincerity, and ask to be believed. It is also a ritual act: a speech directed outward, toward an other. The works in Plead emerge from this compromised address, where identity is not simply expressed but externalized, encoded, and offered up.

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The artists are not interested in authenticity as a return to some stable inner self. Rather, they work through the overproduction of selfhood: avatars, screenshots, selfies, cute/sexy/kawaii masks, and platform-native fragments. Plead stages an ego death through the self. The self is not overcome by being stripped away, but by being pushed through too many surfaces, symbols, and iterations.

 

Personality becomes impersonal. Persona breach into the expanded field. Painting, drawing, sculpture, and cinema appear not as life rafts for a dead internet, but as ritual technologies for handling its remains.

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Plead gathers works that ask what kinds of sincerity survive inside insincerity, and what forms of selfhood must be exhausted before one can finally get outside oneself.

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Featuring work by: 

Anthony Yew

Dana Dawud

Poorspigga

Safiya Hawwa

Anne-Joelle Tan

Machine Yearning

Ruby Bailey