A special celebration to mark the end of the exhibition, featuring a tour led by the artist providing insight into her creative process followed by an informal Q&A session with both Josie and ‘a space’ arts curator & programme manager, Mia Delve.
About the exhibition:
Commissioned by ‘a space’ arts, Our Coffers Were Emptied to Pay for Your Pleasures by Josie Turnbull is an installation exploring cycles of desirability, extraction, and obsolescence through the ‘factual fable’ of the Asian Arowana – a critically endangered fish turned luxury commodity. Artificial scarcity and selective breeding practices have transformed the fish into a status symbol and, despite a waning market, a multi-million-pound Arowana trade persists through networks of breeders, collectors, international championships, and ‘groomers’, who perform cosmetic surgeries on the fish.
This installation at God’s House Tower visualises the imagined fate of an anthropomorphised Arowana – a former champion cast aside. Artefacts, including costumes, trophies, and merchandise, build a memoir dramatising the Arowana’s tragic ‘rise and fall’. These individual works repurpose false nails, broken toys, and fast fashion garments – the detritus of overproduction.
The work traces a lineage of British colonial extractive industries in Malaysia, the Golden Arowana’s place of origin, and draws parallels with the ruthless star-making machine of Golden Age Hollywood, as evoked in films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). By framing the Arowana trade as a contemporary tale of overreach, exploitation and spectacle, Our Coffers Were Emptied to Pay for Your Pleasures reflects on a familiar matrix of frictions; global trade, conspicuous consumption, and ecological and moral decay.
