Alice Bucknell, Nightcrawlers (still image), 2025, video game, gameplay duration 15-20 minutes. Copyright the artist and courtesy the artist and IMPORT EXPORT, Warsaw/London.
Salon by IMPORT EXPORT
47 Bedford Street WC2E 9HA London
Bat Cave by Alice Bucknell opening 17 April 2025, 5 - 8 PM
Contact salon@importexport.art
IMPORT EXPORT is excited to announce Salon – its sister space in central London. Nestled in between beauty parlours, the minuscule Salon by IMPORT EXPORT will serve as a platform for experimental projects by gallery artists. Just like the good old institution of a hair or nail salon, the London space will function as a meeting point and a place to share ideas.
Salon’s spring/summer programme will be inaugurated by Bat Cave — a two-week exhibition and a playtest of the newest game by Alice Bucknell Nightcrawlers.
Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, Nightcrawlers is a pollination simulator and a two-player asymmetrical cooperative game inspired by the secret lives of nocturnal pollinators. Playing as either a bat or flower, players must become attuned to other ways of knowing the world, what to say to communicate beyond language, and how to see more clearly in the dark. In Nightcrawlers, love is an instrument, and music becomes an emotive interface for moving beyond the binaries of sensing and knowing, human and nonhuman, self and world.
The game is developed as part of Platform for Future Assemblies (backed by Chanel Culture Fund) and is made in collaboration with Mati Bratkowski (digital artist and game designer) and Nicolas Snyder (musician and composer). Having been tested by Salon’s public, Nightcrawlers will officially launch at Centre Pompidou in Paris on 6 June 2025.
Coinciding with the exhibition at Salon by IMPORT EXPORT is Alice Bucknell’s presentation of Staring at the Sun - a sci-fi documentary that probes the dark side of solar geoengineering. The film is part From Solar to Nocturnal exhibition curated by Giulia Bini at the EPFL Pavilions as well as the second Solar Biennale at mudac in Lausanne.
Alice Bucknell is an artist, writer, and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games and virtual worlds as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relations and forms of knowledge. Their work has been presented at transmediale, the Venice Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, and Serpentine, among other locations. Their writing appears in publications including ArtReview, e-flux, frieze, Mousse, and the Harvard Design Magazine. In 2024, they are a grantee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, recipient of the Collide Residency at CERN, and artist-in-residence at EPFL’s Enter the Hyper-Scientific program in Lausanne. Bucknell received a MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles.
Following Bucknell’s Bat Cave, still this spring/summer season, Salon by IMPORT EXPORT will host projects by Darya Diamond, Juno Calypso, and Masha Silchenko. More information available soon and on request.
Established in 2021 in Warsaw by Sonia Jakimczyk and Piotr Bazylko, IMPORT EXPORT is a gallery devoted to exhibiting current art. It derives impulse from collaborations with artists who expand definitions of media and engage with political, socio-economic, and environmental agendas.
In Autumn 2024, IMPORT EXPORT moved to a bigger space in a Modernist building near Centre of Contemporary Art Zamek Ujazdowski, where it showcases positions from the original generation female avant-garde artists alongside its contemporary programme.
