LONDON.- TJ Boulting will present the first solo show of Ahren Warner. we have a space for your every mood presents two bodies of work, an installed multi-channel film, like you've never lived before (2021) and a series of photographs and text-works, renew the wasteful force you spend with each hot convulsion (2022).
like you've never lived before was made over five months of the UK's third Covid lockdown, in a twenty-story Canary Wharf co-living tower that Warner moved into in order to make a film. The building is home to around six hundred 'young professionals' in small aparthotel studios, as well as - in normal times - operating as an actual hotel, and is designed as a 'total living solution', offering everything from a gym, pool and spa to a rooftop bar and restaurant, cinema rooms, golf simulation room, lounges and co-working space. It was designed to remove any need to leave, and, in January 2021, you couldn't.
renew the wasteful force you spend with each hot convulsion is an extract from an ongoing series of photographs Warner has been making for several years in party resorts, hostels and events across the world, but particularly in 'hedonistic' tourist hotspots. The photographs in this show were all taken over two months in Thailand in 2019, and are accompanied by colour fields/pastel fades taken from Georges Rochegrosse's Chevalier aux Fleurs of 1894, the titles of which are taken from graffiti found on the walls of a Budapest party hostel.
Ahren Warner works across photography, writing and film. In 2021 he completed an MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2020, exhibiting at South London Gallery in 2021. Other galleries and institutions include Nikola Tesla Museum (Zagreb), Centro the Cultura Digital (Mexico City), British Council (Athens), Great North Museum (Newcastle), Saatchi Gallery (London) and Tree Art Museum (Beijing) with 229 Scribbles (London). Awards and prizes include an Arts Foundation Fellowship, Society of Authors Award and three Poetry Book Society Recommendations. He has published three books of poems, with a fourth due from Bloodaxe in Autumn 2022. Prototype Press presented an intermedia work (film and book), 'The sea is spread and cleaved and furled' in 2020. He lives and works in London.
