Catalogue > At random

Ric Bower, Supercharger-blown collective

Easy Asylum Booth 'Bundu Edition'

Installation multimédia | 4k | | 0:0 | Royaume-Uni | 2023

Supercharger-blown collective offers ‘Easy Asylum Booth ‘Bundu Edition’’, a satirical and situation specific, modular presentation which interrogates European asylum policies, (and attitudes to immigration as a whole) by inverting hegemonic narratives. The collective uses provocative spectacle as a vehicle to facilitate social engagement, partying, shisha smoking, music and political dialogue. Easy Asylum Booth ‘Bundu Edition’ is another chapter in the shifting, magical-real vision derived from the fictitious nation of Botrovia. The booth is a ‘pop up embassy’ offering instant refugee status to anyone seeking asylum in Botrovia. Applicants just need to demonstrate their loyalty by offering 7 x 7cm of their skin for a tattoo specially chosen for them by Skin of our Skin (SooS®), the Botrovian Ministry of Immigration and executed by a flying robotic tattoo gun. Benefits to refugee status include a direct telephone connection with the Botrovian Leader (‘Our Leader is Available’); Training in ‘DASHT (Drone Asylum Seeker Herding Techniques)’ with a fully featured computer game; a lifetime subscription to ‘Botrovian Seeker (Your Guide to Asylum Success)’ plus access to numerous helpful and supportive infographics, interviews and seminars. The project and multicultural collective are formally partnered with Oasis Cardiff, an asylum seeker and refugee charity.

Supercharger-blown collective is a group of artists, scientists and thinkers from a range of cultural backgrounds. Formed and led by the artist Ric Bower their knowingly complex, multi-disciplinary practice often assumes the appearance of an elaborate practical joke and usually explores issues relating to European asylum policy through magical-real narratives. Supercharger-blown collective’s influences include the magical-realism of Murakami and Bulgakov: the satirical illustrator Heath Robinson and the 19th century history painter Thomas Cole. Bower says of Supercharger-blown collective’s approach: ‘...we do not want to make work that sits quietly, meekly waiting to be observed. We mean to make madness that follows you out of the gallery space, slithers into the back seat behind you and shanks you as you drive home.’