Joey Holder (b. 1986 in London, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist based between London and Helsinki. Joey Holder's work raises philosophical questions of our universe and things yet unknown, regarding the future of science, medicine, biology and human-machine interactions.

Abyssal Seeker
2021

‘Abyssal Seeker’ depicts a slow, aquatic journey to a fictional brine lake at the bottom of an unnamed ocean. Protagonists float in and out of the story, semi fictionalised versions of invertebrates, hybridised and constantly shifting.

This work initially might seem to recall Jules Verne’s series of novels set under the sea, which transposed themes from Homer’s Odyssey to the crucible of 19th Century colonial expansion. While the colonial project of exploration employed naming and categorization to enable ownership, the beings in Holder’s world attempt to evade identification, classification and subsequent commodification. Holder’s brine lake represents a place beyond mapping, the deep sea as a metaphor for the limit of human knowledge, a place beyond categorisation, beyond monetary value, beyond the colonial project of taxonomy.

This artwork represents an optimistic speculation of an acceleration to a dark future, an alternative metaphor for escaping surveillance and the cast of the net, and about a more positive future, an escape to a dark, safe place beyond data.