SALON

Salon by IMPORT EXPORT
47 Bedford Street WC2E 9HA London
Floor 2, Stair access only
Please buzz to enter
 
Bat Cave by Alice Bucknell is on view until 17 May
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 12 - 6 PM
 
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 was inaugurated by Bat Cave — a four-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.
 
Set in the Grand Palais at nightfall, the game allows players to temporarily inhabit the alien bodies of a common pipistrelle bat, Europe’s smallest and most plentiful “superpollinator”, and the vespertine flowering datura, a highly poisonous plant of the nightshade family. Native to the Southwestern US including what is today known as Los Angeles, Bucknell’s home, this plant flourishes in unlikely landscapes typified by human industry: alongside the shrubby no man’s land of highway shoulders, clutching onto the concrete columns of overpasses, its velvety, trumpet-like flowers can be seen unfurling as day turns to night.
 
Datura is often one of the first species to reseed itself following extreme weather events like flooding and wildfires. Known by some as “sacred datura”, Datura is used medicinally by the Chumash people, the Indigenous stewards of the region known as California, and it has strong associations throughout history with rituals and medicinal work for its painkilling properties and powerful hallucinogenic potential. The history of the Datura, its striking shape, and powerful psychoactive possibilities—both inciting death and discovery, in varying doses—speak to the ongoing life cycles of night to day, spiraling out to the birth, death, migration, and survival of these precarious ecological relationships within an era characterized by mass climate change.
 
The mechanics of Nightcrawlers are fundamentally inspired by its two playable protagonists. Embodying the flower, players move through the underground world of the game level, catapulting themselves rhizomatically through glowing teal root networks in pursuit of four symbols that are used as a pollination call. Embodying the bat, players must use echolocation to sense the landscape and its hidden symbols, which appear in short purple bursts. The building itself appears as a “defaced” render—its skeletal mesh and polygon count exposed with each pulse, while the landscape maintains its full texture, growing in scale and complexity with each successful pollination. Securing these hidden symbols activates the pollination minigame, a “call and response” interaction between the two characters where melodies are made and sung back to each other 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.
 
Though limited in number, bats, moths, beetles and other creatures of the night are in fact keystone species, propping up the livelihood of entire ecosystems. With the primary sense of sight being decentered from their life worlds, these beings have developed highly attuned means of sensing-with the world around them. A flower petal becomes like a satellite dish, capable of amplifying sonar call from miles away. The heady musky scent of pollen is intensified through . The symbiotic “lingua ignota” or unknown language of these creatures, their deep entanglement within their environment and the blurry borders between their bodies and the ecosystemic body. As an homage to these aliens on earth, Nightcrawlers explores a sensory intelligence that abandons the daytime focus of the image in favor of sound and haptics.
 
The game is developed as part of Platform for Future Assemblies (backed by Chanel Culture Fund) and is made in collaboration with Mati Bratkowski (game design and development), Nicolas Snyder (score and sound design), and Tom Joyes (graphic identity and UI). Having been tested by Salon’s public, Nightcrawlers will officially launch at the Grand Palais in Paris on 6 June 2025.
 
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 were 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 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.