Kafka’s The Top is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief that ‘the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things’. Disgust follows delight almost at once: he throws down the top and walks away. Yet hope fills him again each time the top-spinning begins — ‘as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty, but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated’.
He calls it knowledge; Anne Carson calls it love. Mood Swings takes that flip as its tempo: chase, catch, drop — glamour in tragedy, tragedy in glamour. The spinning top becomes a figure for spiralling, for the way feelings gather force and turn into their opposite. What begins in hope can end in disgust; what feels like collapse can suddenly tip into release: the only constant? Change and uncertainty.
Swinging hard and high, sun-sparkles dance across your vision: brief, blinding flashes where joy and dread blur together. The lurch in your stomach when happiness arrives too brightly, too briefly; the pulse of hope inside grief; the anxiety threaded through sweetness. Too sweet turns bitter; too bitter turns sweet.
The curators’ shared point of departure is Britney Spears: an emblem of cultural projection and collective longing, public vulnerability and the distorted shimmer of celebrity. From there, the exhibition unfolds across six distinct practices that excavate the emotional whiplash of being a person who feels — and is seen feeling. The works register digital intensities and autobiographical rupture; cycles of performance, humour, shame, pop-aesthetics, desire, and survival.
