Upstream Gallery proudly presents its second solo exhibition with Kévin Bray (1989): The Interfaced and The Compass: Playing Realities.
The exhibition officially opens on Saturday 6 September from 17:00 to 19:30 at Kloveniersburgwal 95 in Amsterdam, and therefore will be closed during the Gallery Night on Friday 5 September!
Structured as a fictional game inventory, the exhibition The Interfaced and The Compass: Playing Realities assembles a visual archive of objects, symbols, and relational artefacts across two rooms: one staging the digital versions, the other their physical counterparts. Together they expose four coexisting layers: the digital and the physical, the pre-idea and the post-idea. Each layer remains partial without the others while participating in the same reality. A floor grid operates as interface, serving as map and memory, where assets sit side by side, the remnants of a game that resembles many games at once: no fixed goal, only encounters.
At the center is Oan, a protagonist who crosses thresholds rather than worlds. Moving between layers, they return with relations, tools, signs, companions that reframe both rooms, suggesting that fiction and matter co-produce realities. The exhibition proposes that our digital life, as much as fiction, is not the opposite of the real but one of its engines. Games, feeds, and stories do not merely represent the world, they organize attention, institute rules, and script action. In this sense they may not be “true,” but they are real, real in their effects on bodies, habits, and infrastructures. Each artefact functions as a “prop” that activates practices across rooms. Inventory becomes a way to read how imagination sediments into things, and how things, in turn, reactivate imagination.
Image: It is preparing the floral offensive, Kévin Bray (2025)
