Kara Chin shares the inspirations and ideas behind her Liverpool Biennial 2025 installation Mapping the Wasteland: PAY AND DISPLAY, on display at FACT until Sunday 14 September. 

This interactive, multimedia installation is inspired by Manga and apocalyptic video game graphics that explores rage, grief and nuisance. Kara draws on repeated motifs such as seagulls, parking meters, and the seemingly invasive Buddleia plant often found in cities, including Liverpool. Here, they serve as metaphors for global unease and anguish in the face of economic and ecological decline. The project extends to the streets of Liverpool with intricate ceramic tiles appearing on Berry Street — just a few minutes away from FACT!

To accompany her artist text, Kara has also shared some behind-the-scenes snaps from her studio. Read Kara's text and explore more →

I’ve been thinking about the commodification of rage.

Lately, I find myself scrolling to comment sections not for insight but for friction - tiny flare-ups of conflict, strangers locking horns over nothing. My feed serves up “Top 5 Karen Moments” dangled like a carrot, a tasty psychological bait. I waggle my fingers over the screen - what can I be angry about today?

The mechanics of Clickbait have become more ubiquitous. The tone of all content must get louder and more emotive, because attention is scarce, lucrative and must be seized. YouTube intros mimic wrestling promos - amped up, adrenalised, designed to prepare us for confrontation. Channels like Jubilee stage moral theatre and churn out expertly clipped outrage loops. AI-driven content farms accelerate this further - pumping out synthetic rage-bate, automating provocation.

It’s the industrialisation of affective capitalism - factories of feeling, optimised for rage and reward. These emotional hooks are disseminated, transforming us into terrible monsters or righteous heroes, depending on the algorithmic lens. We are to be avatars in a perpetual stand off - jacked up and furious, frozen in a combat video game splash screen, staring each other down across an infinite network.

In this exhibition, I wanted to take everyday “nuisances” and, in the spirit of the clickbait headline, blow them up into oversized, outlandish creatures - exaggerated enemies poised for battle. Over-the-top VFX, sound and gadgetry begging for your attention.

The show features parking, seagulls, and buddleia - subjects that came up during conversations while I was visiting Liverpool, but which, I think, also symbolise broader patterns of ecological and economic disruption in the UK.

Seagull thefts regularly feature in online articles with escalating tones of outrage—appearing more frequently as the birds move further inland, away from dwindling fish stocks and toward our hard-earned treats. Buddleia, too, is increasingly thriving in harsh urban environments, colonising the cracks in crumbling buildings. Both are described as invasive nuisances, but are also just nature adapting to a changing environment. Buddleia reintroduces ecological diversity to cities, attracting butterflies, bees, and other pollinators - a quiet retaliation against urban decay.

As for parking, road rage has been steadily rising in the UK and the car industry itself is becoming a fraught political football. Like online anonymity, the car provides a disconnection - the anonymity of wearing a big metal mask. In a way, driving turns us into robots. The car becomes a costume, or armour, through which frustration can be amplified. I consider Car parks as perfect arenas for directionless rage - claustrophobic, cold and competitive. Often the only point of interaction is a machine or online chat bot. Automated services become catalysts for fury. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes in Futurability, pre-programmed responses don’t just limit interaction, they foreclose the possibility of new outcomes. A pre-empted answer is a form of control, trapping the user in an infuriating loop when things aren’t working. 

So, the exhibition drops you into a car park battle arena and invites you to engage with a parking meter, like an arcade game. You push its buttons - like it pushes yours - triggering combat fighter moves from a surrounding flock of seagulls, displayed on screens overhead. After one too many button pushes, a ‘rage’ sequence is activated: the seagulls unleash their ultimate attack. Following the encounter, seagull poo drops from the sky and lands in the towering pile in the centre of the space, what a sight!

The two sculptures on either side are piles of local car parks, reimagined as rageful fighters. Their exteriors bristle with gooey bared teeth, passive-aggressive bumper stickers, and ceramic trash. Big buddleia fingers point and wag at each other in accusation. Deep cracks run across their exterior surfaces and floors, with ambiguous ceramic forms - buddleia roots or exposed bones - peaking through like battle scars. They’re poised like contestants from Robot Wars - primed for combat. Computer fans whirr to stop them overheating, but their mechanical rage is barely contained. They are dressed for spectacle. They shimmer with hair tinsel that flutters in the wind - because it’s a show after all and they ought to look good.

NOW FIGHT