Category Art
Published September 3, 2025
Feast with the Beasts, by Develop Collective
The Eranda Studio at the Photographers’ Gallery is dark when I enter, washed in a soft pink light. A long banquet table stretches through the centre of the room. Draped in black cloth, it is scattered with Gothic paraphernalia: tilted lampshades, red roses, candles, naked bulbs, and silverware in varying states of disarray. Technology imposes itself through subtle gestures — an electrical cord snakes around a wooden chessboard beside a framed drawing of a lizard’s belly, while a pink flower in a miniature saucepan balances on an Arduino board. Goblets and pearl-slicked conch shells sit innocuously beside VR headsets. The furry, dismembered forearm of a beast rests on a chrome platter, its silver claws grazing a white Mac keyboard.
Among this cacophony of objects, three draw my attention: a coin, a bell, and a vase. They appear on the elegant handout I’m given at the entrance, physical proxies for three archetypes: the Lure, the Liar, and the Dictator. I’m not told which is which. That’s part of the game.
Drawing on the mythos of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its cautionary tale of scientific hubris, this year’s Develop Collective presents Feast with the Beasts, a speculative VR allegory that gestures toward themes of contemporary consumerism, algorithmic influence, and digital monstrosity. Comprising six young practitioners — Ashima Pargal, Tuğçe Küçük, Eliana Dyer-Fernandes, Lisa Jinxuan Zhang, Alex Xiaonan Guo, and Disha Gupta — the collective brings together photography, curation, architecture, and immersive design in a multi-sensory installation shaped by object-oriented ontology.
Feast with the Beasts, by Develop Collective
I’m invited to take a seat at the dinner table and put on a VR headset, pulling the straps tightly around my head. This is my portal into the exhibition’s virtual realm. The transition is disorienting at first: the richness of the physical space recedes as I’m plunged into a taut digital world. The narrator’s voice guides me as I navigate a surreal digital chessboard, the three familiar objects suspended in mid-air. Prompted to choose one, I select the bell, and enter the realm of the Dictator.
In this world, green shrubbery lines the walls of a dome, with apertures that open onto what looks like the sky. Ominous sharks lurk in these blue patches, their shadows reflected in the pool that coats the floor. You can grab a huge silver spoon hanging in the air and dip it into the water like a net, but nothing catches. I wonder if this is intentional, a metaphor for our lack of agency in a dystopian future, or present. An eerie, disembodied voice murmurs threateningly in the background. In the midst of it all floats a pulsing red heart, sheathed in silver.
Feast with the Beasts, by Develop Collective
Drawing loosely from the concept of egregores — thought-forms exerting collective influence that can take on lives of their own — Feast with the Beasts approaches object-oriented ontology as a speculative framework: one in which objects act as agents with the power to shape experience. Each of the three objects corresponds to a behavioural domain. The Lure evokes immediacy, addiction, and the commodification of attention; the Liar, ideological manipulation and misinformation; the Dictator, algorithmic persuasion and decision-shaping. The exhibition’s physical world becomes a mirror universe for the intangible monsters that haunt our screens, networks, and political imaginations.
In Feast with the Beasts, the Develop Collective stages an interactive journey where human agency is refracted through objects. Their speculative dinner party is a site of prophetic encounter, offering a glimpse into the architectures of digital power, and inviting us — for a moment — to break bread with the forces that shape us.
Feast with the Beasts was exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery from 24 July – 27 July 2025.
