AHREN WARNER: PORTFOLIO
I will pay to make it bigger.
London: Prototype, 2024. Novella & Photobook, 240pp, Edition of 3000.
I will pay to make it bigger is both an experimental novella and a photobook. It will be published by Prototype Publishing, alongside a solo exhibition of new moving-image and photographic works, and live performances, in Autumn 2024. The work blends a second-person, seemingly autofictional narrative with lyric prose and forty photographs. The photographs are produced from compositing and editing multiple films stills, taken from footage shot on location in Thailand over three months in 2019. As a whole, I will pay to make it bigger explores the transnational commodification of hedonism, the performance of masculine identity and the narcissism of desire, across multiple literary and visual registers.
[click the image below for an extract from the current manuscript]
We have a space for your every mood
London, TJ Boulting (2022). Four-channel installation, installed photographs.
We have a space for your every mood was a solo exhibition at TJ Boulting (London), that presented a four-channel installed film, and a body of photographic works. Production of the film, live like you’ve never lived before, involved moving into a twenty-story ‘co-living’ tower in Canary Wharf for over five months, occupying one of six hundred ‘studio’ rooms that are marketed primarily to young finance and corporate law professionals working in the area. The text for this film was extended into a series of poems, that was subsequently published as one section of a longer book, I’m totally killing your vibes (Bloodaxe, 2022).
I'm totally killing your vibes. [extract]
Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2022. 118pp. Edition of 3000.
I’m totally killing your vibes is my fifth book of poetry, and included two significant sections derived from films exhibited at either TJ Boulting or South London Gallery. Extracts were reprinted in the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Documents in Contemporary Art series (Oceans, 2023) and in The Forward Book of Poetry (2023), as well as in magazines in the UK and USA.
Stilled Images (Palma: Tube Gallery, 2023).
Group exhibition (curated).
Stilled Images was a group exhibition I curated as the inaugural show for a new commercial gallery, Tube, in Palma de Majorca. The exhibition investigated the dialogue between still and moving image-making, and presented works by eighteen artists, including Heather Phillipson, Anna Barham, Juno Calypso, Lydia Blakeley and Garrett Pruter.
Please click here for exhibition text.
from Over the Counter (2022)
Digital prints on Hähnemuhle Baryta, 240gsm.
Exhibited in 'Stilled Images' (Palma: Tube Gallery, 2023).
Over the Counter is a series of large format photographic works that explore the materiality of trans-national supply chains. Each photograph is the result of a game that produces a group of raw commodities (e.g. coal, oil, steel, buckwheat or copper) that can be mapped across global supply chains and commodity trading routes. These commodities are then purchased, blended and ‘stewed’ to produce photographs that also void them of anything but aesthetic value.
A moose is always a moose on a moonlit macadam, smelling slightly like the acrid smell of gasoline (& other works)
Two-channel UHD film, 13:36 (looped). 2021.
Exhibited in 'Stilled Images' (Palma: Tube Gallery, 2023).
A moose is always a moose on a moonlit macadam, smelling slightly like the acrid smell of gasoline is a two-channel film exhibited either as a screened moving-image work, or as installed alongside a selection of backlit duratrans photographic works. The film was produced out of footage collected during two months documenting hedonistic ‘party hostels’ in South East Asia.
The sea is spread and cleaved and furled.
London: Prototype, 2020. Book, 72pp, edition of 500 & 4k UHD video (10:34).
The sea is spread and cleaved and furled is both a book of prose poems and a single-channel moving image work. The book was published by Prototype Publishing (2020), and the film was exhibited as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries (South London Gallery, 2020)
You look and act very smooth.
4K UHD video. 12:09, single-channel. (To be exhibited at Grove London, 2024).
You look and act very smooth is a single-channel UHD film that explores the ‘bathetic’ failure, or limits, of fantasy. It combines the rather monotonous documentation of several characters enjoying generic hotel lobby breakfast food, a long-form second-person narrative voice-over, and an original soundtrack composed by sampling the soundtracks from three films that open in airports, Die Hard (1988), La Jetée (1962) and Przypadek/Blind Chance (1987).