Performance Talks is a series of conversations with artists, curators, and art workers about what it means to work in the most ephemeral art form of all: performance.
COMING SOON
Murder on Canal St
It’s 2022 when I ask the artist and choreographer Alvin Tran if he wants to participate in an exhibition I’m working on at the Appel Art Center in Amsterdam. I don’t really know him, but I know of him. Friend and curator, Anaïs Castro, has worked with him in Shanghai and London, she says, and every performance turned out impressive. I look him up online and can only find a few short videos, but I’m taken. I can’t immediately place his unique style. I reach out to him to ask if he’d be interested in presenting new work. He responds positively, telling me that he finds my theorizing of the body compelling, “I have so many fan questions!” After I speak to him over Zoom, I text my friend: “I love Alvin!!”
It often starts out like this, the relationship between an artist and a curator. Finding each other in our ways of seeing, understanding and translating the world, like any other relationship. Several hours-long calls follow between New York and Seoul, where Tran is based before he moves to New York late in 2023. We discuss art, dance and theater we see in Asia (mostly him), in the USA(mostly me), and in Europe (us both). During our conversations, I learn that he easily switches from critiquing pop choreography to referencing obscure dance performances I didn’t know existed. The performance in Amsterdam never happens, but the idea of staging a new work by Tran keeps pestering me. Then comes the invitation from 99 Canal. There is not a lot of time to prepare, but I remember my friend telling me that Alvin choreographed the performance in Shanghai and found his dancers within a week. Alvin tells me he’ll be in London leading up to the performance date, but will create the piece there, collaborating with an old friend on the choreography. The scores will be recorded and shared with the dancers in New York. He shares fragments with me as he drafts the work. Rehearsals will take place in the days leading up to the performance.
And so I am writing this curatorial text without having seen the full work live: a common occurrence for any curator working with performance. How do you put into words a work that doesn’t yet exist? I read Alvin’s script, listen to his selection of songs, and manage to attend one rehearsal before the deadline. I’ll start with what I know; Tran is not a New York performance world fixture (yet). He was raised in Seattle and lived, studied and worked in the USA, Europe and Asia before finding his current home in Brooklyn. Originally trained at Pacific Northwest Ballet, he has done choreography work shown in museums and galleries, as well as for “The Inner Mongolian National Troupe of Song and Dance” and a range of K-Pop stars. His work contains odes to New York’s performative history, while also slowly trying to corrupt its Western affect. Tran’s choreographic language reads as a hybrid homage to Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and other post-modern legends, blended into a K-Pop and larger pop vocabulary. His scores are made through his hyperlocal and hyperglobal gaze, leaving the work feeling as personal as it feels collective. It makes for a movement invention that feels oddly familiar, yet doesn't quite quench a desire for resolution. Tight, yet messy. A bit unhinged. His musical selection flirts with a similar eclecticism, switching from nostalgic Brit pop to hyper contemporary Asian pop while occasionally resting on more instrumental avant garde sounds. He’s an insider and an outsider.
The tension between legibility and illegibility in Tran’s work means his work cannot be reduced to a pastiche of any of his inspirations. Yes, it contains an acknowledgement of the daily movements post-modern dancers pioneered in their iconic works, which still are the main fabric of our shared lives. But he also injects an awareness of “online behaviors,” that now also imbue our contemporary pedestrian movements such as TikTok scores, often recorded in public space. I gather from the script, the scores, the music, and the conversations with Alvin a certain cultural disconcertment. How do we hold ourselves, he asks us, while continuously split between the physical and virtual in a world full of horror and societal erasure? We seek to regain control of events, inventing culturally networked gestures that unite the way we move through the world. We are one and the same. We are uniquely ourselves. “Where’s the spokesperson that’ll make it all make sense. Nowhere to be found,” says the narrator in his performance script. Something's gotta give. Will we unite? Will we dissolve? Will the performers in “Murder on Canal St” make good on their word?
© Jeanette Bisschops
Location: 99 Canal St, New York Date: May 11, 2024 Time: 7pm Choreography: Alvin Tran With: Lucia Santina Ribisi, Ella Dawn W-S, Benjamin Sanchez, Sarah Li Baugstø Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops Design: Pacific Pacific
About the choreographer: Alvin Tran is a choreographer and artist that works in folk dance and music videos. He explores how folk dance's structure challenges linear narratives of postmodern dance with interests in its entanglements with Asian modernisms and Cold War narratives. He continues this exploration in the realm of pop and music videos where he is interested in how pop sonics transform multiple performance traditions into consumable affect.
Art & Language, Joel Dean, Paige K.B., Anna K.E., Christine Sun Kim, Kang Seung Lee, Sue Tompkins
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops
Off Script brings together a group of artists whose works offer propositions to liberate signs, symbols and words from the conventions of traditional language and text. Including works by Art & Language, Joel Dean, Paige K.B., Anna K.E., Christine Sun Kim, Kang Seung Lee, and Sue Tompkins, Off Script revels in open-ended storytelling, uncovering new forms for vocabulary and dialogue. Destabilizing a fundamental linguistic hierarchy, the works break out of the constraints of straightforward meaning and interpretation and deflate ideas of truth and authorship.
Celebrating the messiness and sensuousness of communication, questioning the authoritarian effect of printed text, and exploring the opaque quality of unfamiliar or forgotten signs, the works in this exhibition tell tales that abandon and adhere to different carriers, spill in new structures and forms, and activate the bodily functions of communication. Where does language originate and leave our body? How does it find its receivers and where does it fail? Has the digital age abstracted our interactions by the use of complexity-reducing interfaces and scripts? Making use of linguistic and symbolic layering, blurring, and repetition, the works in this exhibition show how the use of ambiguity could expose the indefinite quality language inherently carries. Asking questions that do not need to be answered, these works deliberately extend a line of escape to a language that refuses to be easily processed and predicted.
Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Kate Cooper, Remy Jungerman, Rory Pilgrim, Eoghan Ryan, Michele Rizzo
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops
In a time when human experience is becoming increasingly controlled, structured, and algorithmic, there seems to be a growing need to reconnect to languages by means of which unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible states can be manifested, and existing patterns can be disrupted. Through a selection of videoworks presented in a dedicated screening room and a dance performance by Michele Rizzo, both taking place at Navy Pier, this special presentation of work by Netherlands-based artists suggests that sonic expressions can constitute their own architecture that carries emotion, knowledge and the ability to connect and transform. The works on view offer a journey through sonic time-based media practices, and is a celebration of the complex processes of translation between the sonic, the visual and the physical.
Inspired by observations of the historical connections between religious rituals and collective dance; choreographer, dancer and artist Michele Rizzo navigates the transformative power of contemporary techno music in his performance HIGHER xtn.. Initially brought to life for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 2018, the performance toured to several European art institutions. The presentation of HIGHER xtn. at EXPO CHICAGO was Rizzo’s first-ever performance in the United States.
The program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and is made possible with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization on visual arts and cultural heritage in the Netherlands.
Monica Mirabile
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops
The presentation of the video documentation of all things under dog, where two things are always true (2022), is part of Jeanette Bisschops’ ongoing research on the multiple roles and lives of performance. It aims to provoke an opening to questions about the meaning of works that hinge on time and space. What does it mean to bring a remnant of an intimate live event to a window space looking out on a public sidewalk? Can we as the viewer, access and invoke the remembering of a live event, even if we were not physically present when it took place?
Acknowledging the intimate ties between performative actions and the political, this presentation also considers the unequal access to space, visibility and power. Connecting to the therapeutic qualities of Mirabile’s practice, who has been an integral part of Performance Space’s reimagination of its curatorial and directorial power structure over the last couple of years, the work in its current presentation threads together dialogues about access and power in the city and the art world. By creating multiple overlapping scenes in space and time in her live performance, Mirabile rejects a hierarchical viewing experience that is now translated to a public video presentation installed in a domestic windowsill overlooking Franklin Street. Deepening her audience’s engagement with the work, its experience destabilizes formal categories of actor and spectator. Where is the stage, and who is playing a part?
all things under dog where two things are always true (2022) by Monica Mirabile
‘All things under dog, where two things are always true’, Monica Mirabile’s 11th choreographed work is the product of a year-long process of fostering and intertwining 5 specific performers as an outlaw ecosystem rising from a lack of resources to cultivate a support structure. While Mirabile began the process with a multifaceted narrative around the social/familial mafia formation, the piece mutated through somatically digging into where the performers held information within movement and through a technique Mirabile calls ‘unblocking’ - externalizing into choreography. The weight-bearing movement central to the piece mirrors the self-creating family. Within this therapeutic architecture, Mirabile builds out a collapsing of time from the combined personal histories of the performers and herself—working through questions of grief, trauma, support, and ultimately resilience in family systems and the society they are influenced by. all things under dog travels continuously through symbolic representations of a house—with five distinct rooms dividing The Keith Haring Theatre—and a black hole. Heightening the intimacy of the work, the audience, viewing the piece in small groups, move through the rooms with the performance.
Meriem Bennani, Nicholas Grafia, Josh Kline, Pow Martinez, and Mikołaj Sobczak
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops
State of Flux is a group exhibition that examines the concepts of shapeshifting and humor as protective adaptations to geopolitics and the perils of contemporary existence. The show brings together four artists – Meriem Bennani, Nicholas Grafia, Josh Kline, and Pow Martinez – of the diaspora who wield absurdism to guide viewers through the streams and ruptures of virtual and corporeal life. Their eulogy for our solid form is a comic one, testifying to the idea of shapeshifting as an age-old trait intrinsic to humankind.
Inspired by the curious indeterminacy of Polish sociologist Zygmut Bauman’s analyses, State of Flux explores the idea of liquid modernity, not simply as a process of modern self-actualization, but a state of human society at the threshold of perpetual collapse. What lies therein the act of surviving within the context of repetitive circles of destruction? Using a wide array of mediums and convening from various localities, the artists chart the historical, contemporary and potential future forces that underlay an incessant state of transfiguration, where uncertainty has become a universal narrative. Placing fluidity as a central concern, the exhibition underscores the way it is both weaponized as a tool of power as well as everyday resistance, and implemented to create alternative worlds.
Comprising the exhibition floor of the New York location of Silverlens Gallery, the works included in the exhibition represent cross-disciplinary approaches that incorporate methods of digital animation, performance, and social engagement alongside traditional artistic mediums like painting, drawing, and sculpture.
Picking up on complex motions and effects of interwoven imperialist histories, the exhibition explores a refiguring of form and meaning in a post-truth world. Many of the figures on show could be somehow re-traced to rich folkloric narratives centering tactics of shape-shifting in Southeast Asia and beyond, as well as in science fiction and mythology. With the quality to physically transform oneself through superhuman powers, demonic forces or sorcery, shapeshifting figures can carry within them ideas both of otherness as well as resilience and survival. In this exhibition they often function as a symbol of the liminality of identification; so often a defining quality of diaspora. The contemporary metamorphic imaginary, according to philosopher Rosi Braidotti, contains two contradictory tendencies. A reactive one, expressing the anxieties of a dominant, white, male, hetero identity, whose social and symbolic entitlement is disintegrating. And the active, empowering one, that embodies a shift of perspective that she calls “the process of becoming nomadic subjects.” Her idea of becoming nomadic does not predicate on a stable, centralized self, but rather a multi-layered, non-unitary entity which designs new forms of interaction with otherness, reconstructing the subject-other relationship.
Josh Kline’s readymades respond to Braidotti’s first mode. Building on a long-term body of work in visceral critique of American social-political breakdown, they are literally the elephant in the room as to what resistance contemporary socio-political and economical transformations might evoke. The wooden figures of an elephant, widely recognized as the symbol of the Republican Party originating from a cartoon by political cartoonist Thomas Nast, sit here quietly in a playpen and a stroller. Don’t be fooled by its dormant state though, as its tail contains the ingredients of a match stick, carrying potential for the animal to transform into a weapon of destruction. Kline’s lightboxes calmly shine over us, presenting a camouflage collaged of Ayn Rand novels, Wonder Bread, and Aleve, tempting us into the metamorphic idea of self-actualization to keep us productive as we unravel.
Meriem Bennani’s video work Guided Tour of a Spill explores the power of metamorphosis in a futuristic nomadic subject. In Bennani’s dystopian world, teleportation has replaced air travel, and her fictional island CAPS houses migrants who have been violently intercepted teleporting illegally, often in the middle of their teleportation process. Using their disassembled state to their advantage, merging with the data that leaked into the ocean, they develop transformational modes of defiance in opposition to the US troops who hold them captive. As the ‘CAPS guide’ in Bennani’s video states: “The ocean became a YouTube soup, and you’ve been swimming in it.” Reflecting on how we all have been floating in a world of data and code, circulating through channels of digital and geopolitical power, the artist aptly comments on human and cultural fungibility moving between online and real spaces, just waiting to be disassembled.
Manila-based artist Pow Martinez knows well what it means to live in the YouTube soup. Suggesting he has been doing “what a nature painter might do in a digital landscape,” he wades through endless YouTube feeds that directly inspire his painterly subjects. His work, resembling cartoon frames, snapshots from daily life found on our social media streams, or magazine illustrations, features a large cast of recurring figures, such as soldiers, cavemen, snakes, ghosts, gods and monsters. In his world, all these personas could seemingly switch form in a heart-beat, like snakes shedding their skin, reflecting on how we have become masters of transformation and reimagination of our identities, either in response to the high demands of a capitalist system or as a tactic of empowerment. They also bring to mind the inevitable forces that necessitate a change to survive. Martinez’s little nebulous ghosts float around the space as a playful reminder that our corporeal reality is and has always been a changing and temporary one.
Nicholas Grafia’s figures balance between mythological, folkloric and pop-iconography, successfully finding strategies to transform as to arm and liberate themselves from systematic oppression. His figures move fluidly between genders, skin tones, and time as a magical subversion of global power structures. His work draws direct links between modern civilization and colonial history, its subjects ready to shapeshift into something else at any moment, carrying the inherent traits of adaptability that marginalized subjects have always had to inhabit. The presentation of his performance Peasants together with collaborator Mikołaj Sobczak exposes direct links between contemporary social hierarchies and historical slavery movements, imperialism and serfdom. Using spoken word, choreography, and disguise, they present the viewer with negotiations of social codes, linguistic practices and rituals found in communities throughout the Philippines, Jamaica, the UK and Poland.
A visible thread throughout the exhibition is the use of absurdism and humorous play as a strategy to confront or mediate ongoing social upheaval, a tactic historically channeled by the oppressed. With its ambiguous nature, ever evading simple categorization, humor here functions as its own shapeshifter offering a new way into viewing and dealing with contemporary existence. While waves of historical occurrences wash over us, a sense of humor about it all may keep us standing. Can we construct new systems of thought that can help us think about change and living transitions in an affirmative fashion? Will we come out of this time transformed, perhaps even transcendent? As the main character in Bertolt Brecht’s play about the forced transformation of an citizen into a soldier (Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man)) says;
"Don’t try to hold onto the wave that’s breaking against your foot. So long as you stand in the stream, fresh waves will always keep breaking against it."
– Jeanette Bisschops
As part of the exhibition, the gallery also presents the first-ever performance of Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak in the US. Peasants was previously shown at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and Kunsthalle Münster. Referring to a time of exploitation and revolution, the piece harnesses spoken word, choreography, and disguise to cast a light upon social hierarchies still present today.
Grafia and Sobczak’s collaborative performances have toured institutional venues across Europe, including MUDAM (Luxembourg), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf) Dortmunder Kunstverein (Dortmund). The artists join us in celebration of Grafia’s feature in the gallery’s current exhibition and the closing of Sobczak’s museum solo show at Kunsthalle Münster.
The performance took place on 10 February (6 PM) and 11 February (3 PM).
Ivana Bašić, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Olivia Erlanger, Brittni Ann Harvey, Madeline Hollander, Umico Niwa, Rachel Rossin, Jennifer Rose Sciarrino, Pauline Shaw, Catherine Telford-Keogh, Alison Veit, Isabel Yellin
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops, Anaïs Castro, Isabel Yellin
There have been many turning points in humanity’s relationship with nature, most often informed by perceptions of the celestial, a good reminder that the forces that shape humanity far precede modern people and will persist long after we’re gone. The collision between nature and technology often conjures sci-fi narratives in which nonhuman forms of intelligence make contact and threaten current paradigms of existence.
Within art history, there is a longstanding tradition of exploring the “other,” using the alien and the uncanny to suggest aspects of human existence that are intangible, yet central to our lived experience. Today, artists are recontextualizing and revitalizing this conversation. They contemplate the alienation of contemporary (post) human experience in an age of accelerating technology and global warming by simultaneously turning their gaze outward and inward. While they have each developed an idiosyncratic visual language and aesthetic strategy, this group of artists have all elected the fantastical realm to articulate the trials and tribulations of the psyche and to engage with a material exploration of the body. Their works testify collectively to the obsolescence of binary distinctions between animal and human, between man and woman, between nature and culture.
Standing against the tyranny of patriarchal anthropocentrism, the artists brought together in SIGNALS are interested in movements towards hybridization. Their work often mixes organic materials and shapes with industrial and geometric forms. The entanglement of organic and synthetic becomes a game in which objects take turns in spurring repulsion and fascination. And while the history of interspecies interaction is one of discomfort and even fear, this is a project that urges a reconsideration of our Promethean dispositions in order to recognize the interconnectedness of all things, living and inert.
JUNE 24 - JULY 31, 2022
Someday
120 Walker Street #3R New York 10013
“Soft Water Hard Stone,” the fifth New Museum Triennial, brings together works across mediums by forty artists and collectives from around the world.
The New Museum Triennial is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to emerging artists from around the world, providing an important platform for a new generation of artists who are shaping the current discourse of contemporary art and the future of culture.
The title of the 2021 Triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone,” is taken from a Brazilian proverb, versions of which are found across cultures:
Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura (Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole).
The proverb can be said to have two meanings: if one persists long enough, the desired effect can eventually be achieved; and time can destroy even the most perceptibly solid materials. The title speaks to ideas of resilience and perseverance, and the impact that an insistent yet discrete gesture can have in time. It also provides a metaphor for resistance, as water—a constantly flowing and transient material—is capable of eventually dissolving stone—a substance associated with permanence, but also composed of tiny particles that can collapse under pressure.
In this moment of profound change, where structures that were once thought to be stable are disintegrating or on the edge of collapse, the 2021 Triennial recognizes artists re-envisioning traditional models, materials, and techniques beyond established paradigms. Their works exalt states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures, porous and unstable surfaces, and the fluid and adaptable potential of both technological and organic mediums. Throughout the exhibition, artists address the regenerative potential of the natural world and our inseparable relationship to it, and grapple with entrenched legacies of colonialism, displacement, and violence. Their works look back at overlooked histories and artistic traditions, while at the same time look forward toward the creative potential that might give dysfunctional or discarded remains new life. It is through their reconfigurations and reimaginings that we are reminded of not only our temporality, but also our adaptability—fundamental characteristics we share, and that keep us human.
“Soft Water Hard Stone” is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator at the New Museum, and Jamillah James, Senior Curator, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA), with Jeanette Bisschops, Curatorial Fellow.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by the New Museum and Phaidon Press Limited. Designed by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull of Studio Pacific, the catalogue and includes contributions from Jamillah James, Margot Norton, Karen Archey, Eunsong Kim, and Bernardo Mosqueira, and features original interviews with all forty artists participating in the exhibition.
With: Haig Aivazian (b. 1980, Lebanon, lives in Beirut)// Evgeny Antufiev (b. 1986, Russia, lives in Moscow)// Alex Ayed (b. 1989, France, lives in Brussels and Tunis)// Nadia Belerique (b. 1982, Canada, lives in Toronto) // Hera Büyüktaşçıyan (b. 1984, Turkey, lives in Istanbul) // Gabriel Chaile (b. 1985, Argentina, lives in Lisbon) // Gaëlle Choisne (b. 1985, France, lives in Berlin)// Krista Clark (b. 1975, United States, lives in Atlanta) // Kate Cooper (b. 1984, United Kingdom, lives in Amsterdam) // Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978, United States, lives in Baltimore) // Tomás Díaz Cedeño (b. 1983, Mexico, lives in Mexico City) // Jes Fan (b. 1990, Canada, lives in NYC and Hong Kong) // Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin) (b. 1988 Whitehorse, Canada, lives in Vancouver) // Goutam Ghosh (b. 1979, India; lives and works in Kolkata) // Harry Gould Harvey IV (b. 1991, United States, lives in Fall River) // Clara Ianni (b. 1987, Brazil, lives in São Paolo, Brazil) // Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, United States, lives in St. Louis) // Arturo Kameya (b. 1984, Peru, lives in Amsterdam) // Laurie Kang (b. 1985, Canada, lives in Toronto) // Bronwyn Katz (b. 1993, South Africa, lives in Cape Town) // Ann Greene Kelly (b. 1988, United States, lives in Los Angeles) // Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978, South Korea, lives in Los Angeles) // Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho (b. 1987, United States, lives in New York) and (b. 1985, Philippines, lives in Berlin, Germany) // Angelika Loderer (b. 1984, Austria, lives in Vienna) // Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq) (b. 1976, United States, lives in Ontario) // Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989, Democratic Republic of the Congo, lives in Oslo and Berlin) // Gabriela Mureb (b. 1985, Brazil, lives in Rio de Janeiro) // Brandon Ndife (b. 1991, United States, lives in Brooklyn) // Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, United States, lives in Atlanta) // Ima-Abasi Okon (b. 1981, United Kingdom, lives in London and Amsterdam) // Christina Pataialii (b. 1988, New Zealand, lives in Wellington) // Thao Nguyen Phan (b. 1987, Vietnam, lives in Ho Chi Minh City) // Nickola Pottinger (b. 1986, Jamaica, lives in New York) // Rose Salane (b. 1992, United States, lives in New York) // Blair Saxon-Hill (b. 1979, United States, lives in Portland, OR) // Samara Scott (b. 1984, United Kingdom, lives in London) // Amalie Smith (b. 1985, Denmark, lives in Copenhagen) // Iris Touliatou (b. 1981, Greece, lives in Athens) // Ambera Wellmann (b. 1982, Canada, lives in New York) // Yu Ji (b. 1985, China, lives in Shanghai)
“Screens Series: Nina Sarnelle” continues the New Museum’s Screens Series, a platform for the presentation of new video works by emerging contemporary artists.
Working across performance, music, poetry, and video, Nina Sarnelle (b.1985, Belchertown, MA) hones in on critical issues affecting contemporary society including patriarchy, capitalism, and climate change. Sarnelle’s elaborate films chip away at such systemic issues that can feel overwhelmingly large, deploying humor and foregrounding them in scenes of everyday life.
Sarnelle’s video essay Big Opening Event (2019), turns a critical lens toward mass celebratory spectacles and displays of abundance at the completion of commercial development projects in the United States. Drawing a comparison between the balloon releases that take place both during these public celebrations and political rallies, Sarnelle aims to untangle the complex relationship between politics and economic development, and shows us how local economies don’t actually benefit from these unregulated ‘mega companies’ such as Amazon.
Sound for the Long Hole (2018) was created after Sarnelle came to the realization that she has been living next to an oil tower and several very deep drilling holes (one 9,514 feet deep) after looking up her location on the Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources website. The work documents a forty-minute music and video performance that Sarnelle staged outside the perimeter wall concealing the oil rig, camouflaged by topiary trees, and considers another world far below the surface of the earth. The video takes us across her neighbourhood, measuring out the length of one oil well in twine, while mining production data from the site’s many historical owners and remembering a specific 1985 methane gas explosion at the site of a Ross Dress for Less discount store in Los Angeles.
Nike X and my Dead Hand (2018-2019) is a video research project conflating the history of the Nike footwear brand’s sneaker line designed in collaboration with basketball stars and the Nike-X anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense system designed by the US Army during the Cold War-era. Sarnelle’s project started out with performative installations at Angel’s Gate/Fort MacArthur in San Pedro, Los Angeles, which was once charged with protecting the Los Angeles Defense Area from aerial attacks. Today, a basketball court at this site has become an iconic location for filming movies and music videos. Sarnelle speaks about the long history of black athletic bodies often cast as soldiers and weapons, drawing lines between militarism and athletic star culture. The work attempts to destabilize the ideology of competition fostered by the free market, and examines a shared language of sports, capitalism and war.
Nina Sarnelle (b. 1985, Belchertown, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the co-founder of artist collectives Institute for New Feeling and dadpranks. Her work has been shown and screened at Kristianstads Konsthall, Sweden (2020), Black Cube, A Nomadic Art Museum (2019), Gas Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Cleveland, OH (2017), the Getty Center, Los Angeles (2017), Ballroom Marfa, TX (2016), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016), Istanbul Modern (2016), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Germany (2016), Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology, Lisbon (2016), and Fundacion PROA, Buenos Aires (2016).
Curated by Jeanette Bisschops
“Screens Series: Kate Cooper” continues the New Museum’s Screens Series, a platform for the presentation of new video works by emerging contemporary artists.
Kate Cooper (b. 1984, Liverpool, UK) deploys computer-generated imagery (CGI), a technology typically used in commercial production, to create worlds populated by digital figures who perform everyday human actions. Using an uncanny mix of photographic and pixel-built images, Cooper explores how new visual languages complicate divisions between physical and virtual selves.
Cooper’s CGI protagonists perform to soundtracks by Soraya Lutangu, also known as Bonaventure. They bleed, bruise, and get sick, displaying a fragility that belies their presumed immortality—and perhaps offers a way of resisting the demands of the digital capitalist economy. Cooper’s works suggest that we can reclaim autonomy by countering or refusing virtual forms of labor, instead allowing these intangible bodies to act in our place.
Several of the videos portray a woman haunted by a zombielike figure. In Symptom Machine (2017), the woman pulls herself along an endless conveyor belt. We Need Sanctuary (2016), which draws its title from “sanctuary sites”—places in the body that are impenetrable to medications—shows her coughing up blood. Infection Drivers (2019) further explores the body under attack. In that video, a CGI figure struggles to move and breathe in a translucent suit, which takes her body through transmutations of stereotypically masculine and feminine physiques as it inflates and deflates. In a time of increased public surveillance through facial-recognition software and biometric data mining, Cooper’s high-definition world invites us to investigate and perhaps find freedom in the technologies often used to constrain us.
Kate Cooper (b. 1984, Liverpool, UK) lives and works in London and Amsterdam. Recent solo exhibitions include Hayward Gallery, London (2019); A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam (2019); and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2014). Her works have been included in group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2018); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2018); Riga Photography Biennial (2018); Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (2017); International Center of Photography, New York (2016); Serralves Museum, Porto (2015); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2015); and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, and the Saari Residence in Hietamäki, Finland.
Curated by Jeanette Bisschops
An exploration of technology and new media in art
The influence of technology and new media has radically changed the way we create and experience art. 'ART FWRD: On Technology' highlights the impact of digital art forms in contemporary artists practices. 'ART FWRD: On Technology' was the first in the exhibition series 'ART FWRD' - an inquiry into a selection of urgent current themes. The other two parts of the trilogy -'ART FWRD: On Care' and 'ART FWRD: On Performance'- were cancelled because of the pandemic and closure of the venue VondelCS.
With: Kate Cooper (1984, U.K., lives in Amsterdam) // Harm van den Dorpel (1981, the Netherlands, lives in Berlin) // Geoffrey Lillemon (1981, U.S.A., lives in Amsterdam) // Jasmijn Visser (1984, the Netherlands, lives in Berlin)
Curated by Jeanette Bisschops in collaboration with Manique Hendricks
Bin Koh, Natalia Jordanova, Valerie van Zuijlen
Curated by: Jeanette Bisschops in collaboration with Manique Hendricks
In the current condition of blurring boundaries between the so-called real and the virtual, digital technologies have been permeating our lives to such a degree that we can no longer distinguish them from the physical realm we call reality. We are not only sharing bits and pieces of our lives online, we are actually living our lives increasingly through technology.
The project 'Untouched Intimacies' explores how art practices investigate our ever changing experience and understanding of intimacy, questioning its definition in multiple ways. Intimacy, here, is not a neutral experience but a cultural construct of social conditioning imposed by patriarchal, heteronormative and Western structures, institutions and norms. The ways we experience and shape intimacy through technology thus depend on a manifold of factors that need to be highlighted and explored in this time of rapid digitization that is happening to our social, political and economic systems and lives.
'Untouched Intimacies' navigates the fluid, shifting boundaries between intimacy and technology. The project presents critical and personal views that complicate the notion of intimacy and the influences of technological development rather than propose one single true version.
Video Club is a screening series highlighting the Stedelijk’s collection of time-based media. Through thematically organized selections of moving image works, Video Club presents films and videos spanning diverse eras, regions, and artistic movements. The rotating screening series puts time-based media into dialogue with other works on view in Stedelijk BASE, and draws attention to prominent issues and motifs that recur throughout the museum’s collection.
Desire has been a popular subject throughout the art historical canon, with treatments ranging from Manet’s Olympia to Carolee Schneeman’s self-made erotic film Fuses. As technologies such as dating apps shape how we pursue courtship and romance, our experience of desire is becoming increasingly screen-based. The fourth edition of Video Club brings together moving image works from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam collection that interrogate and destabilize conventional notions of desire.
The video works shown here consider public desire and fantasy, the corporate creation of desire and its individual implications, how forms of desire are gendered and can be undone, and the ways in which physical desires are translated into the digital realm.
Following the approximately hour-long screening there was a discussion with screening curator Jeanette Bisschops and guest speakers Melanie Bühler and Bas Hendrikx.
Artists featured in this edition include Frances Stark, VALIE EXPORT, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Jon Rafman.
Curatorial Assistant
“Freedom of Movement” was the 2018 edition of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s Municipal Art Acquisitions, a biannual exhibition that features recent work from artists living in the Netherlands. The Municipal Art Acquisitions always focuses on a different discipline, and this year’s version brings together artists who work within the field of time-based media, which includes film and video work, internet art, performance, choreography, sound art, and workshops.
“Freedom of movement” is a phrase that describes the right of a person to travel within a country, or to go abroad, whether as a refugee, immigrant, or vacationer. It is commonly used in a legal context to describe human and mobility rights. While the phrase often refers to physical movement, it can also be considered metaphorically in terms of social mobility. The privilege of being able to move freely in society is influenced by factors such as race, gender identity, ability, and sexuality. While privilege is often discussed in terms of lack, it is equally—if not especially—important to consider how privilege shapes power structures.
The twenty artists participating in the exhibition Freedom of Movement: Municipal Art Acquisitions 2018 take varying approaches to this theme. While several focus on how the act of crossing a border has changed due to advancements in technology, others look at the daily lives of immigrants and how the body itself can limit mobility. Other works consider the legacies of migration, genocide, and statelessness, and the cultural biases embedded in disciplines such as mathematics. Artists also examine the creation and expression of cultural identity through objects, folk songs, and language. All of the participants in this exhibition ask viewers to reconsider their assumptions about civic engagement and responsibility, and to think about how we understand our neighbors, our environment, our world, and ourselves.
Participating artists: Isabelle Andriessen, Remco Torenbosch, Melanie Bonajo, JODI, Rafaël Rozendaal, Jonas Staal, Joy Mariama Smith, Michele Rizzo, Falke Pisano, Polina Medvedeva, Jort van der Laan, Rory Pilgrim, Basir Mahmood, Sara Sejing Chang, Juan Arturo García, Deniz Eroglu, Kate Cooper, Verena Blok, Danielle Dean and Yael Bartana.
