Coloured Processor, 2015 Sculpture

‘Coloured Processor’ was part of Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, a fully playable mini golf course for which nine artists were commissioned to design a hole. The works were commissioned by EM15 consortium as part of the Veince Biennale 2015. Participating artists include:

John Akomfrah
Yara El-Sherbini
Doug Fishbone’s
Ellie Harrison
Candice Jacobs
Hetain Patel’s
Lindsay Seers
Yinka Shonibare MBE
Eyal Weizman

EM15 is a new partnership between artist-led organisations and institutions from the East Midlands, UK,: New Art Exchange, QUAD, One Thoresby Street, Beacon Art Project and the academic partner Nottingham Trent University, with digital engagement support from the University of Nottingham.

Mini, or crazy golf, as it is sometimes known, with its comical miniature obstacle courses and associations with tacky seaside holidays, sits strangely comfortably in the modern Venetian cityscape, which attracts a mix of well-heeled and mass-market holiday-makers and cultural adventurers: a water-side tourist trap spilling over with baubles; a city bursting with unparalleled cultural riches.
Doug Fishbone’s course invited the artists to respond to ‘The Leisure Principle’, where consumer satisfaction is prioritised at all costs. Each of the holes can be read as an autonomous work, but by playing a round and immersing oneself in the game, one can experience a coherent and at times disturbing sense of a world (mis)shapen by our consumer habits and desires.

Hetain Patel’s squatting figure is an ongoing symbol in his practice. A characteristically eastern posture, in India it is only adopted by the working and lower classes. The displacement of this posture to Europe in a game of mini golf - itself a working class leisure activity – frames industrial cultural exchange, specifically production lines involved in import/export. Here the player becomes a complicit cog in the machine, hitting the ball through the system, hand cranking the conveyor belt, and listening to the sound of their golf ball pin-balling through the figure’s torso, digested and expelled all to quickly before it is picked up and taken on to it’s next experience. Meanwhile the squatting figure waits for the next player, trying to blend in chameleon-like, with it’s surroundings.

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