EnclaveLab | London, UK | July 2018
Fred Bungay, Lucy Cowling, Riet Timmerman, and Aubree Penney
Curated by Aubree Penney

In his 2015 book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber speaks of the form’s ability to render us stupid through its deliberate fragmenting and compartmentalizing of information about ourselves and our world into boxes. Graeber ultimately proposes creative work as a means of escaping bureaucratic structure. ReFORMed took up this mantle, reconsidering the form as a tool for codifying and creating information through creative strategies.ReFORMed featured work made in a corresponding workshop which addressed how bureaucratic measures facilitate and complicate our lives, our identities, and our creative projects and considered where we position both ourselves and the figure of the human bureaucrat against the maze of information extraction and processing. The project investigated how forms can become sites of resistance both in their creation and in the act of completion. A series of completed forms toyed with the idea of an honest or reasonable answer and reimagine each form's purpose. Newly crafted forms for viewers to fill out yielded both humour and frustration, mapped across a sea of boxes and blanks.

Generously supported by MFA Curating Goldsmiths

Photos courtesy of Sam Greer, 2018.