Aria Dean: Abattoir, is the New York-based interdisciplinary artist’s first exhibition in the UK. The presentation includes two artworks related to the artist’s investigation of the foundational relationship between death and modernity on conceptual and material levels.

The ICA’s main gallery features Abattoir, U.S.A.!, an immersive film installation with 8-channel sound. Commissioned by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago where it was presented in 2023, the film traverses the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. The film was rendered using the 3D computer graphics tool, Unreal Engine, and is mimicked in the ICA’s gallery through physical echoes of the virtual space. Composer Evan Zierk’s accompanying score samples field recordings, cinematic instrumentals, algorithmically generated sound, as well as a familiar pop cover. In the US context, the way an industrialised slaughterhouse establishes and perpetuates a particular relationship between human, animal, and machine resonated with the structrualised violence against Black Americans. Presented in the UK at the start of 2024, Dean recognised the capacity of the analogy to accommodate broader architectures of modernity – colonialism, industrialisation, fascism – and has created a new sculptural installation for the London context.

Abattoir, U.S.A.! addresses its subject in a seemingly straightforward way: it is a short survey of the corridors and chambers of an imagined slaughterhouse. Death, that quintessential candidate for symbolism in art, is here approached materially, via the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century architectures of a killing maze. The film addresses intersections of concept and form: on the one hand, the literal and allegorical subject of the slaughterhouse as a particular collision of industrialisation, human and non-human actors, architecture, and death; on the other hand, structural film, which prioritises the processes and materials of filmmaking over narrative content. The secondary gallery contains Vitrine*, an installation of four large vitrines and an accompanying wall text by the artist. The vitrines are empty save for a single word marked on their red velvet lining with a branding iron. The brand, a tag of ownership usually burned into living flesh, emphasises the palpable lack of a body. As with the film installation, the implication of violence is through the structural elements at hand.

As an artist and writer, Dean is invested in a theoretical critique of representational systems, analysing how aesthetic theory, image networks and visibility map onto questions of race and power. Conceptually this work began via Dean’s sustained engagement with the writing of French philosopher Georges Bataille, specifically his mention of the slaughterhouse as a site that must necessarily sit outside of what we deem ‘civil society’ to uphold the boundary and function of that society. We literally and conceptually situate animal slaughter on the outskirts. Against a contemporary backdrop of systemic violence and subjugation, the subject of Dean’s exhibition looms large. Here at the ICA, situated on The Mall in the seat of the establishment, Dean places what has been pushed to the outskirts squarely at centre.

‘A mini death-world haunted by the ghostly residues of liquidated life.’





Online exhibition guide
Large print guide
Sensory map

From the shop

Thursday 8 Feb – Sunday 5 May 2024

Tue to Thu, 4 – 9pm
Fri to Sun, 12 – 9pm

Tickets £5, valid all day

Free for ICA Members, some concessions, and on Tuesdays

Book online, by phone 020 7930 3647 or email sales@ica.art

Event Programme

Sunday 5 May 2024, 4pm
Live Performance of Abattoir, U.S.A.! + panel discussion
Composer Evan Zierk and animator Filip Kostic join Aria Dean for a new version of the film that they will develop in real-time during the performance, followed by a panel discussion.

Past programme

Saturday 9 Mar 2024, 4.30 pm
Site and Simulation curated by Aria Dean
Programme of short films that explore the entanglement of sites and their simulations. Introduction and Q&A following the screening with Aria Dean via video conference.
Wednesday 7 Feb
Exhibition Preview
Join us for the opening night of the show.

Friday 9 Feb
Artist Talk
Artist and writer Aria Dean discusses her recent work and the thinking behind her current exhibition at the ICA.

Wednesday 3 Apr 2024, 6.30 pm
Abattoir in Relation
On the occasion of Aria Dean’s exhibition Abattoir, the ICA hosts a panel discussion in response to the work, currently installed in the ICA’s lower gallery. Featuring writer and critical theorist Che Gossett, artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and other guests.