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Yi-Fei Chen

Tear Gun
For Yi-Fei Chen, a graduate from Design Academy Eindhoven, her impossibility to speak up in self-defense during a confrontation with her tutors resulted in an internal burst of frustration, but externally only defenseless tears emerged. After that she decided to acknowledge this weakness, but reacting to it through her graduation project: “Tear Gun”, a minimal device that freezes tears instantly, ready to be fired in self-defense.

Thom Browne

Mens SS 2020
“After the scene shifted from a selection of 2D garments, removed to reveal Browne’s brilliant designs below, the show began in earnest. The looks, as gleefully playful as ever, took on elements of Browne’s typical offerings and elevated them to the level of supreme costume design. Several imposing silhouettes recalled dresses worn by Antoinette-era aristocracy, with gargantuan trousers and shapely sportcoats crafted to resemble distorted Ivy League staples. Elsewhere, pleated skirts emerged as a prime trouser replacement, with cropped jackets and seersucker jockstraps to introduce a sporty motif.” Jake Silbert

Robert Breer

Float
The Floats – or floating sculptures – that Robert Breer took up producing again at the end of the 1990s, emerged in 1965. The word “float” meaning something floating – a marker, fishing float or buoy – and which also describes those carnival vehicles whose pretend wheels give them the appearance of floating above the tarmac, enabled Robert Breer to apply this principle to works of a new genre. Primary shapes, neutral colours and, for the most recent, an industrial aspect, the Floats were then made with polystyrene, foam, painted plywood, and, more latterly, out of fibreglass. At first glance, these simple structures appear immobile. In fact, they are moving, imperceptibly, within the space they inhabit. Motorised and on mini-rollers – which raise them slightly above ground, giving them an air of weightlessness – they glide unbeknown to the visitor, following random paths that are interrupted by the slightest obstacle that they encounter.

ANOUK WIPPRECHT

PANGOLIN DRESS

The Pangolin Scales Project demonstrates a 1.024 channel BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) that is able to extract information from the human brain with an unprecedented resolution. The extracted information is used to control the Pangolin Scale Dress interactively into 64 outputs.The dress is also inspired by the pangolin, cute, harmless animals sometimes known as scaly anteaters. They have large, protective keratin scales covering their skin (they are the only known mammals with this feature) and live in hollow trees or burrows.As such, Pangolins and considered an endangered species and some have theorized that the recent coronavirus may have emerged from the consumption of pangolin meat.Wipprecht’s main challenge in the project’s development was to not overload the dress with additional weight. She teamed up 3D printing experts Shapeways and Igor Knezevic in order to create an ‘exo-skeleton like dress-frame (3mm) that was light enough to be worn but sturdy enough to hold all the mechanics in place

MSHR

Threshold Release Ornament
MSHR is the art collective of Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy. The duo collaboratively builds and explores systems composed of sound, light, sculpture, software and circuitry. Their practice is a self-transforming cybernetic entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, the resulting emergent form serving as its navigational system. These outputs primarily take the form of installations and performances that integrate interface design with generative systems and a distinctive formalist approach. MSHR’s name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time. MSHR emerged from the art collective Oregon Painting Society in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Shu Lea Cheang

Avatar of the artist
Taiwan in Venice 2019
“For those who don’t know her, Shu Lea Cheang is a figure of Net art and the cyberfeminist movement that emerged in the 1990s. Living in New York at the time, she was also an active member of the activist video collective Paper Tiger Television (as was French filmmaker Nathalie Magnan). Since then, Cheang’s work has dealt with “concerns including sex, futures, gender, ecology, money, media, and food [to] encompass film, installation, online work, social processes, and direct intervention in the sociopolitical, technical and aesthetic systems, and the imaginaries which co-compose them,” writes Matthew Fuller

Kapwani Kiwanga

Flowers for Africa
Flowers For Africa the artist mined archives related to African de-colonization to compile a list of flowers associated with individuals, nations and/or resistance movements; an image library that became the basis for meticulous sculptural recreations of individual flowers, or entire bouquets. As Kapwani described of the series, in a statement that reads as apt in relation to her overall approach: “What I’m trying to do is to acquaint myself with these various historic times, and questions, and more generally an interest I have in power dynamics. With this project I have chosen to look from the African continent at these global questions of power dynamics. This project is a way for me to acquaint myself with different archives, consulting documents and simply pondering on those moments. In this process, this was the most natural gesture which emerged”

Akram Khan

Kaash
Inspired by Akram Khan’s early training in the Indian classical dance form Kathak, and the hybrid language that organically emerged when Akram’s kathak training encountered contemporary dance in his teens, a vision began to form, fuelled by a desire to learn and create through collaboration with the very best people across all the disciplines in the arts.

The rules were simple: take risks, think big and daring, explore the unfamiliar, avoid compromise and tell stories through dance that are compelling and relevant, with artistic integrity.
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Jo Ann Callis

Other Rooms
Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the “fabricated photographs” movement, Jo Ann Callis has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery. For her, photography is another studio tool to be used, along with the sets she creates and the models she directs, to render the sensual tones and textures of fabric and food, or to animate clay figures of her own making. The persistent inventiveness of Callis’s work has made her a force in Southern California art and in recent photographic practice.

thomas karsten

Thomas Karsten was born in 1958 in Eisenach and grew up in Leipzig[…] Since 1983 he has worked for journals and magazines such as Stern, Art, Nerve (New York), Capital and others. His first individual publication received the Kodak-Fotobuchpreis in 1988. Thomas Karsten emerged internationally particularly through his previous 18 photo books which are the results of the work on different subjects of nude photography for years.

Batsheva Dance Company

Tabula Rasa
Ohad Naharin
Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa
photo Gadi Dagon

Hailed as one of the world’s preeminent contemporary choreographers, Ohad Naharin assumed the role of Artistic Director in 1990, and propelled the company into a new era with his adventurous curatorial vision and distinctive choreographic voice. Naharin is also the originator of the innovative movement language, Gaga, which has enriched his extraordinary movement invention, revolutionized the company’s training, and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices for both dancers and non-dancers.

SONICE DEVELOPMENT

emerging colorspace
Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas
Emerging Colorspace was a robotic drawing installation, realized by the Berlin based duo of artists, designers and inventors Julian Adenauer and Michael Haas, aka Sonice Development, as part of the Red Never Follows exhibition the Saatchi Gallery in London last summer. A new version of the studio’s Vertwalker, a machine with the ability to move on vertical surfaces, walking on buildings, and crawling on interior walls. The machine autonomously applied paint to the wall using a marker, referencing the vertical streets in Minority Report, the flying cars in Bladerunner and 5th Element, or Spiderman, the Silver Surfer and the Green Goblin – just to name a few sources of inspiration that expressed the supernatural. Thousands of lines drawn with different colors gradually formed an increasingly dense colorspace that emerged during the more than 200 exhibition hours, while the wandering behavior of the machine followed simple algorithmic rules with random elements. The result was a web that constantly changed, and never looked the same, exploring new territories and the future in a way ordinary mortals can’t.

jo ann callis

Since she emerged in the late 1970s as one of the first important practitioners of the “fabricated photographs” movement, Jo Ann Callis has made adventurous contributions in the areas of color photography, sculpture, painting, and digital imagery