When we last saw our hero, he had just returned home from his long, exhausting yet highly successful residency at The Residency, still basking in the glow of his first solo show, #instagramresidency which spawned countless opportunities to further his artistic career. His new performance documentation video series premiered with with Sulsul! Plerg Majah Bliff? (Hello! Can I do something else please?) at Share IRL Phase 2: The Anxiety Primer (alongside the great Nikos Kouroushis, curated by @scaleappropriate). For Sulsul!, he trapped himself repeatedly in a pool and swam laps until exhaustion led him to drown — a clever nod to his godly namesake. Not one to be put down by the trauma of dying over and over again until the end of time, Adonis went ahead and documented two further death performances for his first solo show in London, New Year, New You at @seventeengallery, curated by @kinezaaa. What’s in store for him this time? Stick with us and find out! A World of dreams and adventures await! Let’s go! ✨

Yesterday was Green Monday, which is supposed to be some kind of relaxing day to spend with the family, but all I could think of was that these flowers have been in bloom forever. How #weird is that, right?! @orestisagathangelou snapped this photo of me completely #tripping over this, when we went out for our yearly nature walk. I’ve been having these strange thoughts lately and sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming 🤯

Here’s a #truestory. I was just reading an article that some Russian scientists used a #quantumcomputer to turn back time. Apparently the team of physicists managed to restore the #IBM public quantum computer to the state it has been a moment earlier. I couldn’t help but stare at my little homage to #FelixGonzalezTorres Perfect Lovers on the wall of our bedroom, forever moving forwards and apart, and wonder what love would be like in a world where time moves backwards. Another #truestory is that I’m so swamped with work and projects that I have no idea how I’ll ever manage to get everything done in time. I wish those scientists would turn back my time. #overwhelmed #artistpains #cansomeonepleasepausetime

Had the pleasure of attending the opening of @mariettamvr’s #sublime solo show at @drivedriveeeee last night… that #rotten yellow light is still haunting me today. Our own yellow sun is doing anything but rotting. Approximately 1.1 billion years from now, the sun will be 10% brighter than it is today, and in 3.5by it will be 40% brighter, causing the oceans to boil, the ice caps to permanently melt, and all water vapor in the atmosphere to be lost in space. Every once in a while I think about the people (or whatever will pass as people by then) who will live to experience our collective home slowly burning into #Venus, and what their plan of action will be 🔥 #dropitlikeitshot

For approximately 4 billion years this same #rottensun has been feeding us, allowing natural selection to tweak and tinker us so that we went from amoeba to reptiles to mammals to Sapiens. Yuval Noah Harrari believes that the future of mankind lies in adapting our bodies to new technologies, either through biological engineering, cyborg engineering, or moving our material bodies into the non-organic realm. I, for one, can’t wait until I can recharge my batteries after all this working by just plugging in instead of passing out on benches like this 🤖 #robocop #roboartist #lol

Bioengineering could eventually allow us to live completely different lives than the same old boring ones we do now. After expanding our lifespan to two or three times as much as it is now, we might opt to use these technologies to alter our minds, our emotions and even our perception of our selfhood. For #Tranhumanists, this can’t come soon enough as according to them, human nature is a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that can be remoulded into our deepest desires.

I mean, that’s if we’re not just living in a #simulation #lol There’s this hypothesis that says that basically if we ever manage to develop simulated people that are conscious in some form or another, then there’s nothing stopping us from being in a simulation ourselves. Now isn’t that a #mindfuck #existentialcrisis

According to Barry Dainton’s #consciousness theory, it’s theoretically possible for our selves to undergo very traumatising but non-destructive processes. So long as your stream of consciousness is not interrupted, you could alter your mind to your heart’s content, and even eventually alter your consciousness to live out your #ReadyPlayerOne #fantasies 🧚‍♀️ 🧟‍♀️ 👾 Using some basic biochemical tweaking, you could even simulate your entire existence, #sensations and #emotions included. After all, what are they but #biochemical #dataprocessing #algorithms?

Using a futuristic gaming console Dainton calls the U-SIM (the Ultimate Simulation Machine) will allow you to slip out of your own futuristically boring life and enter another one of your own choosing, be it sailing a plasma-powered hoverboard on the seas of Neptune 🏄‍♂️👽 living out Napoleon Bonaparte’s final moments 💥 or even something completely normal like being an #interdisciplinary #artist whose work examines issues of #memory, #truth and the construction of the #self sometime in the early 2000s 🤖

Through all of this, your #consciousness would be completely unaware of the fact that it’s in a #simulation. You could live out entire decades, lifetimes or centuries as a different person all in an hour’s gaming session. The Simulation Hypothesis relies on a civilisation that will achieve this technology, and be able to run complex simulations of their ancestors, be it for educational or entertainment purposes. It could just as well be that you right now are a simulation, blithely unaware of the fact that some 23rd century school kid is observing you for his mid-term thesis, or even manipulating the world around you for some weird science experiment 🔬😱🤯 #oknowimfreakingout

At the end of the day this isn’t even a modern scare at all. People have been #tripping about this since #Descartes talked about his #MaliciousDemon theory 😈 Since perception is subjective can you ever be sure that anyone else exists? The fact that I can never experience not being #me haunts me every day.

🌼 Honestly these flowers have not been growing at all #tripping #wth #isthisreallife #isthisjustfantasy

I have some really #exciting #news to share today! I’ve been invited by the lovely @vewerai and @sayianavva to show my most recent work at their #TestDrive project space, opening next week on Thursday the 11th! 🌟 … now all I need is some recent work to show … #stressed #savethedate

Spent my first day at @drivedriveeeee preparing for the show! I was so #stressed about #time and #ideas and #production and #quality and that all of my #sculptures seemed to be coming out the same, that I decided to do some #yoga to relax my #body and #mind 😬 Here I am doing the Corpse Pose cause #lol as if I know how to do yoga 🧘‍♀️

So grateful to @vewerai for letting me crash in this apartment between #drivedriveeeee and her flat… you can’t even tell it’s here when you look up from the street! 🚗 🚗 There’s only a few days left until the 11th when the show opens, but I’m staying #productive, #sane and keeping my #stress under control with healthy doses of #yoga, #meditation and lots of #fruits and #veg 💙🥒🍑💜

I found a copy of #AlaindeBotton’s Art as Therapy in the bookshelf today, probably left here by some previous resident, and I’ve been devouring it all morning. In it, he talks about how art can help us manage through our daily #struggles by putting us “in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves.” It almost feels like #fate running into this now, at such a tumultuous moment of my artistic and emotional journey ✨ #anartworkadaykeepsthedoctoraway 🍎

Making these #sculptures has taken an almost #meditative aspect... I feel like in a way I’ve been bunching up my #feelings, giving them #form in these #shapes 👨‍🎨 Sometimes I even feel like I can flip a switch and alternate between #moods, in order to get a different outcome. It’s probably all that #Transhumanist reading I’ve been doing! If #artistic #work contains a concentrated #archive of the #self, then these sculptures are like #ZIP files containing bytes of #emotion, and I want to #feel more in order to #express more! 😌🤪😘😎🤓🤩😄🧐😡😴😬☹️😳😵😱

In order to tap into the full spectrum of my emotional palette, I’ve been utilising my research into #Transhumanism, combining it with a new type of #Quantum #Meditation that I read about online. It’s really easy: you just align your brain’s #neurons with their naturally occurring #biophotons, #absorbing and #embodying all the #light ✨ and #love 🥰 around you, which will then all fuse together and #crystallise. You then decide which aspects of your multiverse selves to #manifest in your emergence into a newer, truer self. #easypeasy #lemonsqueezy 🍋

So it turns out everything they were saying is true! Something went interestingly wrong during my #Quantum #Meditation yesterday… as I was sitting there #aligning my #chakras, I realised that not only am I one of a #whole, but I’m also a whole of #one… and instead of #manifesting multiple #emotions, I accidentally manifested multiple versions of myself from throughout the #multiverse! 😱 I really don’t know what to do with so many mes, but at least @hayazeinalabidin seems to be having a good time 😒

Step 1: Have upcoming #exhibition at @drivedriveeeee (opening tomorrow at 8:30PM!) that you’re not ready for.
Step 2: Accidentally #manifest infinite versions of yourself throughout the #multiverse.
Step 3: Create sculpture #production line from the multi-yous. 🏭
Step 4: #PROFIT! 💰💵🤑

After a long night of #hardwork, #coordination and most of all #teamwork (Adonis, Adonis and Adonis kept arguing about who made which of the sculptures 🤦‍♂️)  the show is finally #ready! We decided that I’d attend the opening, while the rest of them take some well-deserved #leisuretime 🏝 Emotional Sculptures opens tonight at 8:30PM at @drivedriveeeee 🚗 🚙 come by and say #hello! 👋 #Shoutout to @vewerai and @sayianavva for being amazing hosts and putting up with us, to @kinezaaa for the #helpful text she wrote, and to @wrangou for the lovely poster 💖

Thank you so much to everyone who attended last night’s #opening! ✨ You are all #stars, and I had a #blast 💥 Now, after all our hard #work, I’m off to meet Adonis, Adonis, Adonis, Adonis and Adonis with @hayazeinalabidin at this secret #pond I found while #researching, for some #swimming and #relaxation 🏊‍♂️ EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES is open until the 26th of April at @drivedriveeeee, Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment

Descending into the dark and uninhabited basement of DriveDrive, one will immediately be confronted by the absently virtual appearance of a swarm of sculptural #emotional makings created by Adonis Archontides. In preparation for this (almost palpable) debut at TestDrive, Archontides exercises #perseverance through a period of intense #rediscovery and #existentialdread. Emotional Sculptures is a continuation of the artists’ #criticallyacclaimed solo exhibition. This praise was casually greeted by the forceful nature of supply and demand economics within late stage #capitalism. #Stressed, #depressed but always #dressed2impress in tight and revealing yoga pants, Archontides embarks on a journey of understanding the vastly non-articulated and sceptical uncertainties of the universe. Unsurprisingly, this scepticism of humanity’s finitude revealed the artists’ shortcomings through a period of multiple existential crises and nervous breakdowns revealing the bipolar binary between #meditation and #expectation. Part 1/4 of exhibition text by @kinezaaa. EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES is open until the 26th of April at @drivedriveeeee, Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment

Archontides previously suffered unlimited slow, time consuming and painful deaths all for the sake of art through the durational performances of Sulsul! Plerg Majah Bliff? (Hello! Can I do something else please?), Za Woka Geneva (I think you are hot) and Ya Gotta Wob’ere! Ya Gotta Wob’ere! (Don’t give up! Keep trying!). Strangely, the artist, even though feeling unbelievably rejuvenated following each death, was #mentally #exhausted of respawning only to perform the same actions each time. Not knowing what this feeling was, Archontides tried to find solace within a #universe of uncontrolled consistency by listening to #FrankOcean’s ‘Be Yourself’ on repeat for an irrational number of times: Listen, stop trying to be somebody else / Don't try to be someone else / Be yourself and know that that's good enough / Don't try to be someone else / Don't try to be like someone else / Don't try to act like someone else, be yourself / Be secure with yourself / Rely and trust upon your own decisions / On your own beliefs. Part 2/4 of exhibition text by @kinezaaa. EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES is open until the 26th of April at @drivedriveeeee, Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment

Archontides began sensing the overwhelming reality of the #imposter #syndrome after having been bestowed such industry attention. #Hysterically #crying like a baby seal on the studio couch whilst browsing through the ‘critically acclaimed’ section of Netflix, Archontides made the wise decision of watching Ghost (1990) in search of what being ‘critically acclaimed’ exactly means in a postmodern simciety. Having watched Patrick Swayze and what’s her face’s name Demi Belluci’s moment in Ghost, Archontides furiously began #experimenting with red clay in increasing frustration convinced that #physically #beating materials by hand would relieve the #eerie #feeling of #guided #non-existence. Archontides’ therapeutic process, dare say #art #therapy, energetically streamlined by the #millennial fascination of finding oneself within the grander scheme of the universe, has caused the artist to become relentlessly #over-productive. In an effort to escape the frustrating routine of predestined actions and desperately trying to comprehend what ‘being yourself’ means, the artist frantically searches for an answer in ‘Self’ by #BarryDainton, stumbling upon mind-boggling #conspiracy #theories about #alternate #universes. Part 3/4 of exhibition text by @kinezaaa. EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES is open until the 26th of April at @drivedriveeeee, Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment

#Fully #immersed in the notion of the #simulation #theory and frowned upon by #collectors, #gallerists and #institutions who were expecting new work months ago, the sinking feeling of failed expectations lingers and forces Archontides begin a #schizophrenic dialogue - Archontides no longer a solitary maker but a duet, and even more so, a group of unanimous persons. Albeit collaborative in nature through #voluntary and #naive #servitude, the Archontides’ Emotional Sculptures are the result of exploring the divine infinity of all emotions in Plutchnik’s ‘Wheel of Emotions’. Emotional Sculptures take form as depressed, excited, anxious, ashamed, happy, disappointed, satisfied and angry entities all imbued within the process of non-arbitrary making - the artist is not only present, but transformed into a productive machine of boundless and #tangible #emotional #artistic #production. Making reference to #Coldplay, the #BritishNickelback, the artist states, “Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard - so I found a way to make more of me to make more of them, that way, everyone is happy and maybe I will have time to feel more like my #real #self”. Part 4/4 of exhibition text by @kinezaaa. EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES is open until the 26th of April at @drivedriveeeee, Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7PM and by appointment

Last day to catch EMOTIONAL SCULPTURES at @drivedriveeeee, open from 4-7PM 💥 Photo by @hayazeinalabidin