Cracking Up — GROVE London + Berlin

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Cracking Up
An Exhibition Featuring Dani Marcel and London Skaters
13.07.23 - 24.08.23
GROVE
9B Battersea Sq., SW11 3RA, London, UK

Opening: Thursday, July 13th, 5-8 pm
9B Battersea Sq., SW11 3RA, London, UK

GROVE is excited to present Cracking Up, an exhibition featuring Dani Marcel and London skaters, running from July 13th, to August 24th, 2023. The exhibition will feature a series of original skate videos produced by London-based videographers alongside a new sculpture by Marcel. This is first time the gallery has worked with Marcel or any of the skaters.

Cracking Up is an exhibition about politics as much as it’s about skating. Or, put otherwise, Cracking Up is an exhibition about understanding politics through skating. We’re fascinated by an anti-capitalist politics that skateboarding necessarily insists upon: creating utility from — and insisting on fun within — hyper-capitalist spaces, often taking steps to exist where others have tried to ban them. Indeed, from the shadows of neoliberalism, freely available credit, and unbridled gentrification, skate demands a bottom-up functionality from urban terrains. From street corners to sky-scrapers, skating is everywhere.

Pulling on this thread, the work of Dani Marcel explores the laughable futility of chasing capitalist imperatives. Making a life-sized silicone model of himself that sits lifelessly in the gallery, he attaches a resin carrot that hangs ever out-of-reach, resting just in front of his face. Using a macabre humour, Marcel doesn’t pull his punches: the pursuit of the “carrot,” figurative, or in this case, literal, will haunt you until you die.

For GROVE, Cracking Up offers a summer show that broadens the gallery’s modes of discourse, while expanding the group of artists (and types of artists) that the gallery works with. Also, we thought it would be pretty sick and a lot of fun.

Installation Shots: