Mark Savon: Beneath the Markers (2024)

“Beneath the Makers: a shrine featuring artificially generated choir singers, deceased photograph and a door shrouded in candles.

Nieling presents the future, as jarringly intertwined with artificial possibilities: who we mourn for hangs in suspension, futures unknown, awaiting judgement, resurrection or honey-shrined rebirth. Emerging as a site of speculative mourning, Nieling’s work explores the contours of a reality beyond the confines of normative temporality and spatiality, confronting the ways we orient ourselves towards or away from the uncanny presence of death—either recoiling in fear or leaning into its spectral logic.

Nieling’s post-human structure, incorporating strands of wires, and leaking mirrors, spills out of its flesh encasement, pointing towards the configuration of perhaps a new life or body– though it is for the viewer to discern what will become.”

― Isabella Greenwood, curator and critic

“[…] the altar to Mark Savon transforms a horizontal door from artefact into portal. Perched on biomorphic metal columns, this structure oscillates between the sacred and profane, inviting reflection on grief, nostalgia, and conspiratorial undercurrents in digital culture.

The door, adorned with white flowers and a photograph of Savon at his computer, operates as a posthumous apparatus of myth-making. Behind him, the looming presence of a Diablo poster anchors the work in a specific cultural and temporal moment, situating Savon within the fiery, baroque aesthetics of late-90s gaming culture. Yet this reference does more than locate; it reframes. The name Diablo, along with the poster’s infernal visual language, refracts the shrine’s ceremonial arrangement through a lens of latent menace. The already cultish gestures of the installation are thus imbued with a distinctly sinister and perhaps satanic aura.

The shrine’s iconography contrasts private mourning with broader cultural reckonings on digital mortality. A reflective sticker, evocative of gamer ephemera, glints with chrome and bold typography: “Ascend All As One,” “Repent Now,” “Eternity is Near.” These doomsday cult slogans encode the work with eschatological urgency, positioning Savon as both sinner and saint—but most significantly elevating him to martyrdom in service of an unknown belief system.”

― crux00, discord user

various materials, video loop, 200x89x40cm