'Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen Is Not Gay!!!!!' A post-critique talk about new ways of seeing - from IKEA to Arcana

"This talk argues that Y2K aesthetics operate as a seductive technology of the future that never came – using colour, repetition and surface to make us feel as though we’ve arrived somewhere we haven’t. Illusions aren’t accidents – they are structured appearances. Drawing on images from queer history, interior design, tarot and film, this experimental talk makes a case against comfort and straightness in its broadest sense – toward aliveness, embodiment and risk (specifically: tszuj). It asks how meaningful, rather than meaningless colour, might bring the future we dreamed of in 1999 into the here and now, through our bodies. From IKEA catalogues to gallery installs, from millennium optimism to the temporary and extractive logic of UK culture today, this talk proposes a way of seeing and being beyond the critique, and looks directly into the imitation and the impersonation of aliveness."