Alternative 23

Alternative 23 is a curated exhibition of works by Steve Aylett, David Blandy & Daniel Locke, Let Me Feel Your Finger First, Laura Oldfield Ford, Plastique Fantastique and Henrik Schrat, including the first screening of Let Me Feel Your Finger First’s Postcolonial Capers. In 1985 DC Comics in the US had taken the commercial decision to unify the complex and contradictory character story arcs from its various strips such as Superman, Batman and Green Lantern. The resultant crossover series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, saw the heroes attempting to align all of the surviving Earths into one single reality that would then make DC Comics continuity more straightforward so as not to confuse potential new readers. In 1987 Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s Zenith, a politically-engaged superhero comic strip originally published in British weekly 2000 AD, brought together a group of superheroes from across multiple realities to battle a mysterious Lovecraftian threat. This threat is intent on aligning all the universes, or ‘Alternatives’, into one, simple universe. Rather than reduce the complex and the inconsistent into the singular, the heroes of Zenith attempt to defend and maintain multiplicities. They meet on a world in Alternative 23. To coincide with the exhibition, the Goethe Institut London ran a comics workshop with Henrik Schrat, and IMT Gallery commissioned an essay by the exhibition’s curator Mark Jackson.