Anemoia Nation

By Sammi Gale

Young people are practically dabbing to go back to 2016. The beginning of this year has seen a groundswell of nostalgia-fuelled searches rising on social media. Since some were calling 2025 the new 2015, you wonder how seriously to take it – will 2027 see us all longing for 2017, per this temporal-emotional algebra, or is there more to this pining for the mid-2010s specifically? For me, 2016 represents the last hurrah before things went a whole lot of horrendous.

For a start, it saw a litany of beloved celebrity deaths: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher, Prince, the list goes on. Politically speaking, we were rearranging our deck chairs on the Titanic. As the sun set one day in late June I spoke to a woman outside the pub who declared proudly she had voted Leave, but couldn’t explain why or what the EU referendum was even about; to be fair to her, this was before ‘Brexit means Brexit’. Donald Trump was campaigning to be President, but no-one expected him to win. Yet by the end of the year, the right wing took the White House. As vapourwave got repurposed into ‘fashwave’, the fascists even came for our synths. The cartoon town of South Park was awash with sentient grapes, ‘Member Berries’, which induced fond memories of the past, such as Star Wars and traditional values, as the showrunners took aim at the Make America Great Again campaign and warned us on the dangers of nostalgia-induced complacency.

Politically speaking, we were rearranging our deck chairs on the Titanic

But compared to South Park’s MAGA Boomers and their hankering for the halcyon days of Reagan or some mythical ‘murica, Gen Z’s nostalgia for a relatively recent time – as time’s crow flies, but ancient if you go by the internet’s warp speed – seems, well, sad. It’s true that no matter who you are, when the future feels especially volatile, it is all too human to reach for the past. But as three exhibitions currently on view in London prove, nostalgia can be an ambiguous business – and not always pretty.

The reclining figure at the centre of Elizabeth Englander’s show at A. Squire has most definitely swallowed a bunch of Member Berries. With Betty Boop’s big blue eyes arranged on her tiny head like an arthropod’s, aping the reclined shape of a Henry Moore (don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, eh?), the sculpture is clad in both the Union Jack and The Star-Spangled Banner ripped up and mashed together again like some kind of confused nationalist kebab. This skin is actually ‘pieced together from a t-shirt [the artist has had] since college’, adding another, more personal tinge of nostalgia.

All the sculptures here are titled Parinirvana, the Buddhist concept of ultimate enlightenment, liberation from rebirth. Their stiff forms suggest the opposite. They look contorted, somehow alert in their inertia. It could be that when chasing release from the karmic cycle in our consumerist society, from attachment to our possessions, the only way out is through – that said, I’m going to take the titles as ironic. The past decade has seen the meteoric commercialisation of Buddhist concepts. Supposed to provide a much-needed reprieve from modern stress factors, they have instead been twisted into a McMindfulness for productivity. As mental health apps Headspace and Calm (which both launched in 2012) meet their proxies in AI Slop-fuelled ads by Liven and therapy from ChatGPT, the mood of the 2010s self-help industry has shifted from optimisation to survival, and from individualism to shared helplessness. Certainly, Boop-based nirvana does not seem to be tabled for the majority of us. Which brings us to the double bind: one way to counteract the Doomer mindset is, breathe in, breathe out (fine, but chuck me an oxygen mask first). The solution to anxiety about the future and a straining towards the past is to re-centre yourself in the present moment (go ahead, warm your hands on the bin fire.)

Boop-based nirvana does not seem to be tabled for the majority of us

As for hope of anchoring awareness in the present moment, Nicola Bealing’s Ship-wrecker (2022) seems lost at sea. The painting, which is included in Sid Motion Gallery’s Poor Form, a group exhibition exploring the silly business of embodiment, is of an underwater puppet whose delicate quiff is held aloft with string. One hand is a piece of coral, the other a pink rubber glove attached to some old rope, as if Pinocchio had to improvise and reassemble himself from the terrible dogfish’s stomach contents. 

like revenants from a childhood spent pulling another Disney VHS tape off the shelf.

Also included are Oona Grimes’ Estruscan ghosts, a series of cheerful colour pencil drawings on drafting film, typically used for architectural plans (the self is something that is falling apart and must be reconstructed). They feature sweet, sad, chinless children with thimble noses and Elmer Fudd-shaped heads and stylish rollnecks. The mean mother and child in Etruscan children: Medea syndrome #28 (2024) wear those white opera gloves from early handdrawn animation (a practical innovation, so Mickey Mouse’s hands would show up when in front of his torso). The drawings arrive smudged out, sparse, a little lost, like revenants from a childhood spent pulling another Disney VHS tape off the shelf. 

The detailed domestic stillness of Daphne Wright’s exhibition Expectations at Frith Street Gallery feels worlds away from Englander’s restless bodhisattvas, Bealing’s shipwrecked puppets, or Grimes’ sad children, but it likewise presents a haunting experience of the good old days. Sons and Couch (2025) (originally shown at the Ashmolean) sees the artist’s children petrified in off-white Jesmonite, on the cusp of adulthood. One boy is stretched lengthwise along the sofa, with one arm behind his head, the other lying bent across his midsection.. His brother sits on the floor, leaning back against the front of the sofa. His head tilts downward, chin slightly tucked, as he ‘looks’ (though as with previous works Sons (2011) and Kitchen Table (2014), Wright’s figures have been cast with their eyes closed) down at his hand – conspicuous by its absence is a smartphone. Staring at the gap where it should be gives you a weird feeling adjacent to phantom limb. 

Wright’s work presents us with a moment of stillness, but the rest of the world seems to be speeding up, smartphone dopamine hits swatting away despair

Wright’s work presents us with a moment of stillness, but the rest of the world seems to be speeding up, smartphone dopamine hits swatting away despair. As it does, we will no doubt be reaching back in search of security more than ever. That reflex isn’t just psychological; it’s cultural. The mid-2010s marked a shift. In 2015, catalogue music overtook new releases — and now as much as 80% of our listening is to songs released years ago. It feels emblematic of a youth culture rifling through its own attic, convinced the golden days have already been and gone. The experience of anemoia – nostalgia for a time you didn’t actually live through – is now widespread.

What if all this anemoia and retrospective longing is inadvertently devaluing the present? If the best has already been done – by The Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg– then we risk rehearsing cultural inferiority as if it were fact. You could call it a kind of Napoleachronic complex: large swathes of the population are so convinced of the smallness and mediocrity of our moment that they’d bite off your hand for 2016’s Pokémon Go, Drake and Boaty McBoatface, while tech investors peddle FOMO like a life jacket; keep up! The future is overhyped and foreclosed at once: we are told history is being made daily, yet convince ourselves it has already happened. 

The future is overhyped and foreclosed at once

Meanwhile, having just had a son of my own, the expansiveness of this moment in my life is set in stark relief against the ever belt-tightening world outside our flat. There isn’t enough Jesmonite to capture this preciousness — or, at times, desperation. He won’t rewind VHS tapes of Pinocchio; he’ll be haunted by a thousand more lost futures and unkept promises à la Mark Fisher, but I won’t have done my job if he thinks his best days are behind not ahead of him. In calling our time mediocre, we quietly absolve ourselves of shaping it. In constantly mythologising other eras — past or future — we risk being puppeteered through our own.