Rebuilding Beirut with Pride

Josie Rae Turnbull is a multi-disciplinary artist and art educator from London. Her current work explores absurdity and entangled lives, with her Master’s thesis investigating how viral animal news stories serve as ‘factual fables’ that reveal the failings of human societies through animal ‘actants’. The work in the Rebuilding Beirut with Pride auction is from a series titled “Supernatural Place, filled with Sufficient Facilities,” which documented amusement parks, private museums, expos, conventions and other curated leisure spaces in and around Ho Chi Minh City, through moving image and 35mm analogue photography. 

The images contrast conscious representations of nationhood -  visible in curated sites such as international trade expos and theme parks  - with quotidien objects that reflect the scaling of conquest capitalism. The sites she documents often embody a prosaic sublime built of polystyrenes and microplastics.

In her practice at large, the scaling of various industries and the notion of ‘insane abundance’ is explored through fabricating deceptive sets of colour relationships, disruptions of macro and micro scales, and various video synthesis techniques.

Josie Rae Turnbull is an artist and art educator from London, currently studying on the Fine Art and Science MA programme at Central Saint Martins, after four years spent living and working in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is currently Artist in Residence at a new primary school in Stratford, and preparing for a duo show in November as part of Hastings Photo festival.

www.josie-rae-turbull.format.com
@friedspectacle