Skip to main content
Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Andréanne Béguin

At Fulfilment Services Ltd. we strive to understand your needs. We build on the logistics of the systemised supply chain: from algorithm to ‘click to buy’, from factory worker to shipping container, from delivery driver to momentarily satisfied consumer; from there we link, de-link, and re-link. Taking place throughout London, with Gasworks as the nexus of a series of public interventions, our project invites artists to respond to the contemporary provocation of an alter-fulfilment narrative.

Fulfilment Services Ltd. is a city-wide exhibition of 12 billboards, 2 vans, online e-commerce platform and digital commissions produced under the framework of CCA RCA Graduate Projects 2021. In our network-based process of collaboration, the site of Gasworks serves as a master fulfilment & logistics centre from which the commissioned artworks are transmitted into the public sphere. Like bees from a hive, like spokes from a hub, like light from a constellation, a series of billboards, vehicles and products are issued. It is in this vein that we appropriate fulfilment logistics, such as delivery networks, transportation webs, and disseminated information points. This culminates in a week of activity, intervening in the existing systems within everyday life; we walk around oblivious to the purpose of the movement around us.

Fulfilment Services Ltd. places the work of Arvid&Marie, DNA, Florence Jung, and Frank Wang Yefeng directly into this network of things, scattering their messages through existing systems of production and circulation. These artist commissions are complemented by a writing commission by George Lynch. We utilise existing dissemination networks whilst also creating our own; working towards an alternative imagination or a rethinking of capitalist logistics disguised as the mechanical supply chain of fulfilment. In imagining alternate realities of fulfilment by looking at the chain of production, networks of transportation, and the extortionist quality of fabricated needs, we encourage YOU to question, does this really fulfil you?

Logistical capitalism and big-tech logistics have seen us monitored in unprecedented ways through the surveilling nature of the internet and internet-of-things. Products and information circulate through layered networks of visible and invisible infrastructures - transforming intangible human desires into a machine-legible language of algorithms and putting the predictive model of human behaviour into mass production. Economic and political models are based on this logic of fulfilment. This dynamic begins to feel extreme when the agents that hold economic or political power are no longer satisfied with simply responding to needs, but rather work towards creating new ones.

The logic of fulfilment creates imagined or predicted future scenarios by satisfying and exceeding the needs of users. In doing so users are integrated into the production chain. The world under fulfilment control is a dystopian scene; in it, the chain of production is no longer unidirectional. This throws traditional pathways into such disarray that it leads us to ask ourselves paramount questions: is there an end to this fulfilment complex? Is capitalism fulfilling consumers or are consumers fulfilling capitalism?

Andréanne Béguin

Andréanne Béguin is an independent curator and art critic. She is interested in multidisciplinarity and the intersection between artistic reflections and practices and issues anchored in today's society: economic, political, sociological, environmental.

Her graduate dissertation, Sustainability: A chance for curating? allowed her to confront curatorial practices with the requirement of economic and ecological sobriety. In this context, she acquired the will to curate, not by sustaining an existing curatorial pattern, but in a new form, which resolutely gets out of the capitalist, productivist and consumerist logics at work in certain current practices and which asserts a strong commitment to care and respect.

Her graduate project, Fulfilment Services Ltd, organised in partnership with Gasworks, confirmed this desire to propose a curatorial approach anchored in reality, with critical and analytical discourse. Proposing to revisit the capitalist logics of fulfilment with artworks, this exhibition was also an original proposal in a form of dissemination with advertising billboards and an online fake marketplace. It was also an opportunity to embody a curatorial approach with a real performative dimension, coherence and continuity between the theme addressed and the concrete form of this exhibition.

In parallel to her master's degree at the RCA, Andréanne was assistant curator for the exhibition Michael Clark: A Cosmic Dancer at the Barbican Centre, then for the exhibition Freedom of Sleep at the Fiminco Foundation, and for Though It's Dark, Still I Sing, the 34th Sao Paulo Biennale. 

Andréanne holds a double bachelor from SciencesPo Paris (Political Science) / La Sorbonne (Modern Literature), and a MA in Cultural Policy and Management from SciencesPo Paris.

Arvid&Marie in collaboration with Batlabat, Smart Assistant, 2021
Arvid&Marie in collaboration with Batlabat, Smart Assistant, 2021
Frank Wang Yefeng, I See You – Slow Your Pace Down – But You Can’t See Me, 2021
Frank Wang Yefeng, I See You – Slow Your Pace Down – But You Can’t See Me, 2021
D.N.A., The World has Ended Many Times for Many Ppl and We are all Bodies of Water, 2021
D.N.A., The World has Ended Many Times for Many Ppl and We are all Bodies of Water, 2021
Florence Jung, Jung79, 2021
Florence Jung, Jung79, 2021

Medium:

Graduate Project 2021