Tired of Being Tired?

When once-defined and well-oiled machines of the reality around us begin to stutter, appealing alternatives are offered like poisoned apples. And so what was once agreed to be round, becomes flat; what was documented, becomes rhetorical; and what was dangerous, is now safe. Toying with worldviews that toy with health and sanity, ‘Tired of Being Tired (?)’ is an exhibition that brings together works by artists Ali Glover, Robin Megannity and Julia Thompson, united by dissonance that saturates the everyday.

To engage with conspiratorial thinking, is to trace the trail of breadcrumbs back to what caused the cracks in the disillusion in the first place. For the present purposes, it is essential to demonstrate the lack of ambition to pin down the exact cataclysmic moment that leads someone to praise apple cider vinegar as the cure to all ills. We have to account for the non-existence of a singular trigger, because the most possibly certain assumption here is that the breadcrumbs trail is just one of many. We reach a fork in the road, and the choice of whether to turn left or right is obscured, when it is no longer easy to differentiate which is which, and which leads where.

Consider the scenario: when presented with such a decision, we want to act intuitively, yet informed. But when the left path, down an overgrown, windy trail leads back to the right, the weight of each step forward suddenly weighs heavier. As the parameters for choice become diluted in the mundane, we envision a clinical space of stripped nuance. ‘Tired of Being Tired (?)’ is a still frame capturing the small disconnects of our every-day. Entering the exhibition, a reading based on the recognition of familiar patterns articulates itself; ruffled magazines, pins holding paper sheets on notice boards, chairs in a row; a waiting room. Quotidian conversation and chores culminate in routines that rarely slip, the hiccups in language and core beliefs almost unnoticeable, masqueraded by the humdrum. For a second, it looked as though the chair was floating – never mind.

Waiting to receive the cure-to-everything prescription, paintings on the wall provide a welcome distraction. You might think, at least the language of figurative painting is straight-forward; we see what we want to see. Working with software to render his compositions digitally before transcribing them using oil on linen, Robin Megannity’s fictional still lives speak in many languages; and here, it is not what we want to see, but what we are capable of seeing. To understand the emerging language is to give into layered meanings of reference, representation and objecthood. Megannity’s paintings hint how, as the layers grow, the dangers of misunderstanding lurk underneath.   

The polarisation of political thought resulted in a counterintuitive case of minus minus equals plus, where the language that provided a given ideology with its form, suddenly becomes interchangeable and feels at home on all sides. The more polarised language is, the more fluid it becomes. Then, almost naturally, linguistic fluidity flows both ways: it can be, and has been, a powerful tool of resistance to hegemonic structures; and at the same time, it can give way to dangerous, slippery slopes of rhetorics. Constants melting away, “fluids neither fix space nor bind time. Fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready and prone to change it.” (Zygmunt Bauman, 2000). As language undermines the solid grasp of patriarchy, white supremacy and neocolonialism, the very linguistic tools of resistance become liquified as well, appropriated and distorted. Leaning into that conversation, works by Ali Glover come into focus once the magazines reveal themselves to be unreadable and the pinboards yield no didactic information. Their silhouettes hold the absence of words and messages, almost safeguarding their content in pure form.

Where the grand narratives of Modernity envisioned end-points and perfect states of nationhood and governance, we now feel the void of what-could-have-been. In the absence of guidance, we continue to strive for clarity and unambiguous meaning, albeit aware of the slippery nature of those terms. After decades of deconstructing the outdated and harmful ‘certainties’ of the past, somehow, we ended up in a situation where questioning the establishment went as far as to present danger to one’s health. It is uncomfortable to have to question not only one’s political opponent, but oneself as well. Deconstructing hegemonic structures while our progressive alternatives fall prey to the pitfalls of language, we carefully articulate responses, yet again. Ready for the consultation, one proceeds to the second room, the promise of resolution imminent. Only here, fluidity becomes the space, in Julia Thompson’s site-specific installation of melted multicolour wax, overspilling, both saturated and translucent, unquantifiable and temporally disorienting. Cast bottles sit on shelves, shapeshifting into familiar containers of perfume, medicine and beauty products, yet here containing unknowable traces of found objects.

In the post-post-structuralist world, perhaps a case can be made for some degree of structure. A mere scaffolding – preferably, linguistic – will suffice. Skipping the complex back and forth on what language is and all its fallibilities, we can find comfort in its original premise: language is there so people can co-create and communicate shared meaning. Hyperfocusing on this premise, the current linguistic trouble proves symptomatic of the current tragedy of human disconnection, and the atrocities inflicted therein. Perhaps the journey on the breadcrumbs trail was never about the destination of cracks and disparities, but rather a place where people spoke the same words whose meaning was shared.



Tired of Being Tired (?) curated by Kollektiv Collective is on view until 5 July 2025 at Santi, London.



Feature image: Julia Thompson, my past paradise, 2025. Tired of Being Tired (?) curated by Kollektiv Collective at Santi, London. Photography by Damian Griffiths