As part of the Cellular World group show for GI2018, Sam Keogh’s Kapton Cadaverine has transformed a corner of GoMA into the interior of a dilapidated starship. The installation is activated by a performance. It begins with an astronaut waking up in the battered cryopod at the centre of the ship. He displays symptoms of premature thawing: memory loss, confusion, frostbite. His stained outfit mark him out as the source of the ship’s filthy condition. He acknowledges the audience but only as hallucinations, spectral symptoms of a prolonged lack of human contact. Intermittently speaking and listening to the on-board computer, he tries to make sense of his surroundings by reassembling scattered memories of the Earth he left behind. These monologues are interrupted by manic descriptions of androids with liquid latex blood, the bacteria feeding on the ship’s walls, or an explanation of a Soviet philosopher’s idea to circumvent the heat death of the universe through a re-ignition of the Big Bang.

Kapton Cadaverine continues Keogh’s interest in melding performance, installation and sculpture into scrappy and mutable wholes. Sculpture and collage serve as props and mnemonic devices for the performance but are also in excess of these functions, spilling over with idiosyncratic detail and extraneous information. Here, the objects shift between artwork made by Keogh, props used by the performer and ambiguous technologies made by the astronaut in a vain effort to patch up the malfunctioning ship. In this indeterminate space, materials, memories and affects begin to smudge into each other until a sticky cognitive map begins to emerge.