The Shock of the Now - Issue #214
Afternoon All - Welcome to Issue 214 of The Shock of the Now! I hope you’re having an enjoyable week.
This week, the full issue includes fifteen Recommended Exhibitions, as well as eighteen fresh Artist Opportunities.
I hope you enjoy Issue 214, and if so do forward it along! As always, questions and comments are welcome, so feel free to get in touch, H x
Recommended Exhibitions Opening This Week :
Linn Phyllis Seeger - ‘True Idle’ Solo Exhibition - Shipton, Hackney Wick (19th March - 4th April, opening Wednesday 18th March, 6-9pm)
Shipton presents Linn Phyllis Seeger’s debut UK solo exhibition ‘True Idle’.
“Featuring new video sculptures developed during Seeger’s studio residency at Shipton between January and March 2026, the presented works negotiate the relationship between the personal car and the personal device, drawing from the artist’s ongoing research on the entrenchment of automobility within the imaginary of Silicon Valley technologies.” - Shipton
Amalia Pica - ‘Daisy Chain’ Solo Exhibition - Herald St, Bethnal Green (19th March - 16th May, opening Wednesday 18th March, 6-8pm)
Herald St presents Amalia Pica’s solo exhibition ‘Daisy Chain’, at the gallery’s Herald Street location.
“Bringing together painting, found object and video, the exhibition centres on a monumental installation of interconnected paintings of daisy chains which snake around the main exhibition space. The installation references Communal Daisy Chain (2025), a haptic, collaborative and seasonal artwork made on site at Cample Line and displayed last autumn. Pica invited members of the institution’s team, visitors and local schoolchildren to interlink daisies which were then pressed, tied together and pasted to create a 50 metres long chain, lining the interior walls of the exhibition space in a gesture she described as a ‘collectively constructed sculpture’.” - Herald St
‘Privacy Index’ Group Exhibition - Lumka, Shoreditch (20th March - 11th April, opening Thursday 19th March, 6-9pm)
Lumka inaugurates their new London location w. the group exhibition ‘Privacy Index’ in collaboration w. Big Brother Watch, EFF and No2ID, featuring Ruby Chen, Nicholas Cheveldave, James Hoff, Miles Scharff, LINX and Ivo Nagel. The opening reception will feature a performance by LINX.
“Privacy Index tracks the ontological evolution of surveil- lance from lens-based observation to its contemporary form. The body itself has become a site of continuous data extraction. Advanced machine vision systems—biometric, cellular, virtual, lens based—transform the corporeal form into an unwitting data mine, extracting a wealth of infor- mation from our facial expressions, gait, hesitations, and microexpressions. This intimate bodily data, harvested and housed in remote server farms, molds the very lens through which we perceive and navigate lived reality.” - Lumka
David Blandy & Petra Szemán - ‘Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Deluxe)’ Two-Person Exhibition - Chemist, Lewisham (20th March - 12th April, opening Thursday 19th March, 6-9pm)
Chemist presents David Blandy and Petra Szemán’s two-person exhibition ‘Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Deluxe)’, curated by Rebecca Edwards.
“Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Deluxe) re-presents Our Ghosts, Our Shells (Endgame), the conclusion of a year-long collaborative project by Szemán and Blandy, bridging the realms of identity and selfhood, reality and simulation, and experience and fantasy. In an era when identities are increasingly fragmented across digital landscapes, it questions how we reconcile our dispersed selves within today’s techno-political milieu. By opening and mending the cracks between player/world and character/creator, the work challenges the nature of agency and identity across platforms of existence. In a hyper-connected age where Away From Keyboard is never quite separate from Meatspace, how we become entangled with alter-egos, doppelgängers, and second-selves reveals the porous boundaries of how we perform, remember, and relate while inhabiting multiple versions of self, both on- and off-screen.” - Chemist
Síomha Harrington - ‘A Spy in the House of Love’ Solo Exhibition - Alice Black, Fitzrovia (20th March - 25th April, opening Thursday 19th March, 6-8pm)
Alice Black presents Síomha Harrington’s debut UK solo exhibition ‘A Spy in the House of Love’, co-curated with Maudji Mendel.
“A Spy in the House of Love invites audiences into the shifting terrains of presence, identity, and relational power. Harrington’s work represents an ongoing exploration of intimacy and the dynamics of desire, probing the boundaries between subject and object. Her practice presents the body as a contested site where agency and objectification continuously intersect, evolve, and converse. A Spy in the House of Love comprises twelve new small-scale paintings alongside a central large painting, contextualised by Valentine Dobrée’s masterwork ‘Black Gloves’ (1930), generously loaned by the RAW Collection. The exhibition resides at the intersection of feminist inquiry, fetish aesthetics, performance, and psychological theatre. At the heart of Harrington’s investigation is the negotiation of power - who holds it, who performs it, and how it shifts - both within the image and in the interplay between artwork and audience.” - Alice Black