Mishka Henner & Vaseem Bhatti
Energy Goast
May 4 - 27, 2023
Energy Goast is a nature awareness brand set up by Vaseem Bhatti and Mishka Henner. The project questions the commodification of ‘nature’ in an age of synthetic landscapes.
Fascinated with the nuclear, military and energy infrastructures that stretch across Northern England’s West Coast, the agency is a shadow of the Energy Coast Masterplan. The masterplan was produced by a regional consortium that sought to attract further energy and infrastructure investment to the Cumbrian economy. Like all outdoors brands worth their salt, one key site on which Energy Goast unravels is Instagram, with a durational campaign that picks apart the visual imagery of nature commodification.
Adverts for the ‘Great Outdoors’ (such as those that drive the neighboring Lake District’s economy) routinely feature stylised imagery and allusions to the wilderness, but these ‘natural’ spaces are in fact somewhat artificially constructed through conservation laws and initiatives. Featuring insta-stylised imagery overlaid with graphics inspired by military optical equipment, Energy Goast builds from a steady churn of #outdoors content into something more critical, capable of grappling with the foreboding landscape of the Energy Coast and the myth-making that takes place around it.
Mishka Henner (French British Belgian, b.1976, he/him/his) is a visual artist born in Belgium and living in the UK. His varied practice navigates through the digital terrain to focus on key subjects of cultural and geo-political interest. He often produces books, films, photographic, and sculptural works that reflect on cultural and industrial infrastructures in a process involving extensive documentary research combined with the meticulous reconstruction of imagery from materials sourced online. His work has featured in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Portland Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2013, he was awarded the Infinity Award for Art by the International Center of Photography.
Vaseem Bhatti (British Indian/Pakistani, b.1973, he/him/his) born in Glasgow, is of Indian/Pakistani descent and currently lives and works in both Manchester and Rome. Also working under the pseudonyms of EHQuestionmark and Bhatoptics, he has an object-specific, concept and process-driven practice with a non medium-specific approach which attempts to deal with notions of facades and surface; questions of material truth, fetishism and hierarchies; and the testing of doctrines of functionality and taste. Commissions include work for artists (Lara Favaretto, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Banksy, Futurefarmers, Agnes Mayer-Brandis, Etoy), musicians (MF Doom, Gruf Rhys, Danger Mouse, 808 State, Demdike Stare, Afrodeutsche, and Matthew Herbert), and institutions (The Modernists Society, Warp Records, Bard, Pollinaria and Pentagram).