Sarah Daher
Sarah Daher is an independent curator, researcher, and writer. She cares about the role of art in building and preserving communities. Her work begins at her experiences of contemporary nomadism and from there works to reconcile how identity can be co-constructed with community.
Her graduate dissertation, Measured in ’Grams: Consumption, Identity Construction, and the Art World Under the Condition of Instagram, looks at how identity is constructed through consumptive behaviour. How this consumptive behaviour is performed on Instagram is then extended to the contemporary art experience. This is travelled through under the guiding question of what this implies for successful curatorial practice under these conditions.
She co-curated Fulfilment Services Ltd. in collaboration with Gasworks London. The project took the form of four new artist commissions situated on twelve billboard sites around London, two vans, and an online e-commerce platform. These were produced under the unified spirit of corroding existing networks of dissemination. Fulfilment Services Ltd. imagines alternative realities of fulfilment by interrogating the chain of production, networks of transportation, and the extortionist quality of fabricated needs.
Sarah has recently curated This lark sips at every pond: women as artist and muse for maisan15 in Dubai and is currently curating her latest show 13 Rules for Understanding the World to be held at ICD Brookfield Place in Fall of 2021. Before coming to the RCA she studied Economics and Theater at NYU Abu Dhabi.
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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 commisions 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 commisions are complemented by a writing commision 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?
Fulfilment Services Ltd was produced in partnership with Gasworks, and supported by Jack Arts and Print&Digi
