'Tar 00:00' forms part of Hap’s inquiry Auguries of Exit, which subverts Blake’s Auguries of Innocence in its vision of infinite natural abundance. Human lives have always been finite, but natural and cosmic timescales extended beyond mortality, providing a sense of purpose or orientation. Now humanity conducts a mass taxidermy of what once appeared immutable: tempos of land, ocean, sky, all point toward some end. Hap’s vandalised Blakean verse, “To see a world in a grain of plastic, and a heaven in a wild inferno, hold smartphone in the palm of your hand, and exit in an hour,” marks a shift to an exhausted synthetic present. At an imagined midnight, technological forms persist beyond their fragility, sustained by belief rather than function.

Yulia Hap (b. 1998) is a Polish painter who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in 2025. She views her practice as taxidermy, recording the present as history: snapshots of a world preserved in anticipation of its disappearance. Her paintings bring human, technological, ecological and geological timescales onto the same unstable surface, where continuity falters and familiar systems atrophy. Thin oil layers, subtractive light and grattage forge remnants that become auguries: faint omens of instability. Selected for the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries 2026, she received the RSA Art Prize and recently completed a Royal Drawing School residency at Dumfries House, with work acquired by Dumfries House Collection.