The term “bad object” originates in the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, where it does not describe an inherent quality, but a projection shaped by perception and experience. In early psychological development, the world is divided into “good” and “bad” objects as a way to manage internal tension. What is perceived as threatening, frustrating, or uncontrollable is externalized and rejected. Yet with maturation comes a more complex recognition: contradiction does not reside between objects, but within them.

Bad Objects, Reconsidered adopts this framework not as a strict theory, but as a point of departure. It extends the notion of the “bad object” beyond the psyche into the material and visual conditions of contemporary life. In a culture driven by efficiency, optimization, and aesthetic coherence, objects are constantly evaluated according to their function, appearance, and exchange value. Within this system, certain objects fall outside, including malfunctioning technologies, degraded materials, excessive forms, and images that resist easy consumption.

This exhibition does not treat such objects as failures. Instead, it approaches them as points of friction, where systems of value become visible. What appears “bad” is often not a property of the object itself, but the result of misalignment with function, taste, or expectation. The works in the exhibition operate through displacement, distortion, and recontextualization. Familiar objects are rendered unstable, stripped of utility, or pushed beyond aesthetic comfort. Others foreground processes of decay, mutation, or excess, refusing the demand for permanence and control. In these gestures, objects cease to function as passive tools and instead assert their own material and symbolic agency.

Rather than proposing an alternative hierarchy of “good” objects, the exhibition holds open a different question: what do we reveal when we suspend judgment? To reconsider the “bad object” is to examine the structures, psychological, cultural, and economic, that produce categories of value in the first place.

To reconsider the “bad object” is not to rehabilitate it, but to remain with it, to resist the impulse to categorize, dismiss, or resolve. It requires acknowledging that discomfort, contradiction, and instability are not exceptions, but conditions that structure our relationship to the world.

In this sense, Bad Objects, Reconsidered is less an argument than an invitation: to look again, more slowly, and to recognize that what we reject may not be outside us, but deeply entangled with how we see, value, and understand.

Participating Artists: 

Adam Basanta
Carlos Blanco Artero
Diana Shpungin
Jimenez Lai