This month, the Dazed Gallery presents a collaborative exhibition from recent LCC graduates, all of whom have swapped around some personality-defining cultural artifacts and tried to make some sense of them through their shared practice of design – exploring human identity and the subjective nature and meaning of those objects through the exchange of ownership.NEW is partly based on the premise that we have gone so far beyond the possibility of creating anything new that now we have to make the best of what we have already created. Creativity’s challenge is to make the best of this situation, to reform what is already there into a discussion of why it is there; as the French art critic Nicholas Bourriaud famously stated, "The question is no longer: 'what can we make that is new?' but, 'How can we make do with what we have?'"The show also attempts to unravel and deconstruct our misguided notions of what each generation generally considers to be new – with everything that we consider as new being nothing more than a reinterpretation of what has gone before, a second-skin carefully wrapped over the original. Peel back those many layers of human progress and eventually we are left left with a single amoeba at the bottom of a deep ocean.

Above: Untitled, Ben Prescott

NEW opens on Thursday January 10, 7-9pm, sponsored by Tiger, at the Dazed Gallery, 112-166 Old Street, London, EC1V 9BG