Manufactured Consent: Caroline Zilinsky

Caroline Zilinsky recently visited the inner sanctum of contemporary power: an Amazon fulfilment centre in western Sydney, perched on a hill like a secular fortress, immense and self-contained. Here, beneath fluorescent light and the soft tyranny of efficiency, the detritus of consumer life - deodorant, dog toys, cosmetics, books, toothbrushes, plastic trinkets - move in endless procession through a landscape of conveyor belts and robotic arms. It is from this encounter that Manufactured Consent draws its title and its animating tension: not simply the contest between man and machine, but the quieter, more insidious spectacle of acquiescence.

There is still a small trace of humanity: fleeting presences absorbed into the larger rhythm of the machine. However, in this vast choreography of compliance, labour becomes data, and desire itself appears pre-sorted, packaged and sent on its way. It is here that Zilinsky roots her latest body of work. She is not interested in allegory so much as atmosphere. In the residue of a world given over to systems too vast to comprehend and too intimate to escape, the individual worker appears as an appendage, subordinated to the larger intelligence of the system. 

If Manufactured Consent begins as an encounter with the machinery of contemporary life, it ends somewhere closer to elegy. What begins in the architecture of logistics drifts steadily toward other unnerving terrains. As the political atmosphere of our world has thickened, Zilinsky’s compositions now seem to shed their density. Suspended fields of colour are stripped of clutter. The presence of a handful of machines is neither triumphant nor benign. They persist with the mute certainty of things built to outlast us.

And yet, these are not cold paintings. They carry a residual tenderness: a faint suggestion of our humanity through the smallest and most fragile signs that show something human still flickers beneath the surface. What remains is not the drama of collapse, but its echo - the strange, beautiful loneliness of a world in which the machine will continue, and humanity may eventually linger only as a ghost within it.

Anthea Mentzalis

May, 2026