Genuine Fake Premium Economy at ICA

The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London presents the exhibition Genuine Fake Premium Economy, featuring emerging artists Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory, whose work examines class, inheritance and wealth. Born in the mid-1980s in the United States, these artists transitioned into adulthood and working life in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and probe what effect this era of financial collapse has had on societal myths of fairness and progress under capitalism.

This group exhibition takes the pulse of a generation living and working in a broken global economy. The acceleration of wealth inequity, art traded as investment, and today’s commodity culture are all uncomfortable realities for a growing number of emerging artists. While their work differs in form (Bliss works primarily in moving image, Ellison in photography and Gregory in painting and assemblage) all three artists share similar stylistic approaches to satirising, staging or appropriating the real. Genuine Fake Premium Economy will be the first UK institutional show for Ellison and Gregory, and a significant contribution to dialogues around artmaking in an age of scepticism towards financial institutions.

Bliss’ film True Entertainment (2023 – 24), set entirely within a fictionalised art fair booth in 2007, calls attention to the vagaries and interdependence of the art and financial markets. It follows the familiar format and style of scripted reality television, packing contrived dramatic narratives under the guise of real life into a snappy 30-minute watch. In this ‘episode’, viewers are let into the exclusive art world and introduced to an ensemble cast: the unstable artist, superficial gallerist, spoilt intern, predatory collectors and performative art school students. Record-breaking sales don’t elicit a celebratory mood; rather events take a foreboding turn when the artist has a breakdown. We watch wincingly as the art handlers talk about starting up their own gallery as they pack down the booth, unaware of the downturn to come.

Ellison presents new commissions for this exhibition, including a series of walnut-framed lightboxes that ostensibly advertise Orlo & Co., a multinational private bank he has imagined. Drawing on meticulous research into this industry and its vocabularies, Ellison examines how terms such as ‘values’, ‘passions’ and ‘philanthropy’ are deployed as euphemisms for investment returns and wealth preservation. In this vein, he has crafted taglines which misconstrue adages from Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith to promote personal wealth building. These texts are laid over images of historical paintings, a strategy Ellison observed being employed in private banking marketing material, where such imagery seeks to manufacture institutional trust and legitimacy.

Also on view is Jack’s Office (2026), an installation that brings together both found objects and ephemera Ellison has designed to conjure a portrait of a 30-something- year-old American working for Orlo & Co.’s London offices. Personal effects such as a framed family photograph and an old T-shirt bearing the name of a prestigious boarding school hint at the institutional structures which have enabled Jack to coast through Orlo & Co., doodling on company letterhead paper with a pen picked up from a stay at a luxury hotel in Paris.

Gregory presents work across a range of media including a video installation Deliver Us From Evil (2026), which unravels threads of our consumerist desires. Scenes of grocery shopping capturing her deliberating on price tags of everyday essentials, are projected across a portrait of the artist and her mother. In contrast, two new paintings from Gregory’s Investment Pieces series depict Patek Philippe advertising imagery which she has re-painted in greyscale, rendering father and son unnervingly stiff while blurring out the watches. In these advertisements, wealth, whiteness and patrilineality are treated as desirable – but as Gregory’s work suggests, are unattainable and perhaps not even aspirational; they are just tools of escapist marketing. Gregory denudes the adverts of their selling power and their sanctimonious idealisation of responsibility to ‘look after it for the next generation’. While marriage and inheritance have traditionally gone hand in hand, the other side of the same coin is divorce and the division of assets. Conscious Uncoupling (Divorce) (2026) is a new sculptural assemblage combining the detritus of a past relationship (an empty heart-shaped chocolate box, an empty wine bottle, gift ribbon etc.) and a painting of the word ‘DIVORCE’ teetering over the edge of a shared plinth – the hollowness and precarity of the composition echoing that of marriage’s function in serving systems of private property.

Genuine Fake Premium Economy is supported by The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.