RESIST SCIENCE FICTION saturates scientific method with deadpan humour, and deploys it as a narrative device. The exhibition title takes a stance against itself: Resist Science Fiction establishes several overlapping and contradictory storytelling currents, weaving together speculative archaeology, personal anecdote, and popular science. Tropes of epistemic authority are entangled with error and speculation. The unreliable narrator embraces her short attention span and follows tangents, allowing coincidence, free association, and word-play to guide the plot.
Containing a staged interview, a chanting wormhole, a photo prop, and a fabricated museum display, Resist Science Fiction gestures at the apparatus of knowledge-making. Perpetually pointing at the audience’s complicity – through the use of scale and anthropomorphic references – the exhibition challenges the myth of an impartial pursuit of truth and the distinction between consumption and production of knowledge.
Loyko’s materially-promiscuous practice functions at the intersection of science, humour, and desire. She embraces the distracted state of mind as a mode of romantic attunement to the world in a climate of perpetual overstimulation by excess information. Looking beyond the idea of a poststructuralist narrative, Loyko’s key concern is the constant renegotiation of the porous, leaky border between the linguistic and material worlds.
Dasha Loyko (b.1995, Minsk) holds a BSc in Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method from the London School of Economics and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art. Recent projects include: Le Grand K, Science Museum, London, 2019, Terminal O, The Horse Hospital, London, 2019, Cooked And Raw, Liverpool Independents Biennial, Liverpool, 2018; upcoming projects include: Taking Places, Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art, Garage Museum, Moscow, 2020.