Octopus is Gertrude Contemporary’s annual flagship curatorial exhibition series. It provides a forum for curatorial experimentation by inviting leading curators to devise an exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary. The 15th edition of Octopus, Lost and Profound, considered the interface between obsolescent and new media technologies, exploring themes pertaining to memory, inscription and nostalgia.

Curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham selected seven artists who utilise readymade objects in their work and subject them to profound renewal and reformatting. The disappearing world where images go to die is the terrain that Lost and Profound navigates. The work in Lost and Profound suggests that memory is a fiction kept warm by the blanket of amnesia that settles as time closes in and obsolescence triumphs.