Acceleration Structures
Dan Holdsworth’s ‘Acceleration Structures’ explores and examines the topography of three great Alpine glaciers, capturing their fragility and intricacy like no artist has done before. Using geomapping technology, Holdsworth’s films guide the viewer through the skeletal landscape of each glacier, giving a unique perspective and a new understanding of their geography.

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit
‘For, in your tongue, I cannot fit,’ gives voice to 100 poets who have been jailed through time for their writing or their beliefs. The haunting work highlights the fragility and vulnerability of our right to freedom of expression today—and the bravery of those who struggle to resist. Visitors will encounter 100 microphones suspended over 100 metal rods, each piercing a verse of poetry. Over the course of an hour, each microphone in turn recites a fragment of the poets’ words, spoken first by a single voice then echoed by a chorus which shifts across the space.

Scale
‘scale’ is an interspecies art project: an audience-interactive installation that involves nocturnal electric fish from the Amazon River Basin. Twelve different species of these fish comprise a choir whose sonified electrical fields provide the source tones for an immersive audiovisual environment. The fish are housed in individual tanks configured in a custom-built sculptural arc of aluminum frames placed around a central podium. The electrical field from each fish is translated into sound, and is thus heard — unprocessed or with digital effects added, with immediate control over volume via a touchscreen panel — through a 12-channel surround sound system, and with LED arrays under each tank for visual feedback. All software is custom-designed. Audience members interact as deejays with the system. Amongst the goals of the project is our desire to foster wider public awareness of these remarkable creatures, their importance to the field of neurological research, and the fragility of their native ecosystem.The project leaders comprise visual/conceptual artist Marlena Novak, composer/sound designer Jay Alan Yim, and neural engineer Malcolm MacIver. MacIver’s research focuses on sensory processing and locomotion in electric fish and translating this research into bio-inspired technologies for sensing and underwater propulsion through advanced fish robots. Novak and Yim, collaborating as ‘localStyle’, make intermedia works that explore perceptual themes, addressing both physical and psychological thresholds in the context of behavior, society/politics, and aesthetics.

山海塾

butoh

TOBARI

“Over the 90 minute performance, I feel no less than transported. There are eight male performers, including Ushio Amagatsu himself. The dancers often move slowly, with incredible muscular control, fluidity and elegance. And suddenly the spell will be broken and they’ll run across the stage, their painted bodies leaving clouds of white powder hanging in the air like a shadow or ghost. Slow sustained movements are countered with tiny, minute gestures of the fingers. Hands are often gnarled, the joints contorted with incredible tension. It is mysterious, hypnotic and strange. The countenance of the performers is most arresting – behind the white paint, their faces reveal the fragility, humility, vulnerability and truth of their humanity.”Day Helesic

Undercurrents

“Mostly the fact that I AM a human body. We can live our lives buried in complex abstraction, or in virtual reality, but you can’t separate your consciousness from the fragility of your physical form. Many of my own fears and anxieties revolve around that realization. I would probably say my pieces involving the human body are a kind of self prescribed therapy to deal with my neurosis”.Albert Omoss

THE LONG NOW
A soap bubble usually remains stable for only a few moments – it is a perfectly formed sphere with an iridescent surface that reflects its surroundings. As one of the classical vanitas symbols the soap bubble traditionally stands for the transience of the moment and the fragility of life. THE LONG NOW approaches the soap bubble from a contemporary perspective – with reference to its chemical and physical properties as well as recent scientific and technological developments. THE LONG NOW is aimed at extending the lifespan of a soap bubble, or even to preserve it forever. Using an improved formula, a machine generates a bubble, sends it to a chamber with a controlled atmosphere and keeps it there in suspension for as long as possible. The project is presented in the form of an experimental set-up in which the newly created soap bubble oscillates permanently between fragility and stability.

Syntopia

With ‘Syntopia’, Iris van Herpen explores the new worlds that arise within synthetic biology and the intertwining relationships between the organic and the inorganic. ʻSyntopiaʼ acknowledges the current scientific shift in which biology converges with technology and visualizes the fragility and power within.

photo: Morgan O’Donovan

АЙРИС ВАН ЭРПЕН
イリス ヴァン ヘルペン
Syntopia
For Syntopia, Van Herpen collaborates with the artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta of Studio Drift, whose biomimic art works translate natural processes by breathing life into delicate immersive sculptures through movement[…] The vivacious glass bird flows in symbiosis with the models while they move over the runway, their delicate interaction emphasizes the fragility of new worlds living and soaring together.

Angelika Loderers work is refering to the basic research of form and space. She uses fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and combine them with sort of traditional sculptural techniques. In the process the play between chance and control defines the aesthetics of her work. The experimenting with attidudes – via a very specific amalgam of materials, shapes and objects- brings forth a new, metaphysical result. “In transience, fragility and decline, I see the formal expressions to which I refer in my designs, and which to some extent provide the framework conditions for my processoriented work. From the abundance on offer, however fragile and vulnerable in composition, the elements fall into place, becoming worthless once again when dismantled.”

Graziano Chair
The Graziano chair was inspired by computer generated wire-frame models, and by toughness coupled with fragility. Wire frame drawings express form though an economical use of marks, and with their own set of codes, they allow a viewer to look at the inside and outside of an object at the same time, and from many angles simultaneously.

That a Dead Man Sings
Creating sculptures out of materials such as sheets of glass, foam, metal, cement, and various found objects, Dave Hardy composes his sculptures’ seemingly precarious poise as an intentionally engineered defiance of gravity. Distinguished by a constant shuttle between literal and allegorical readings, Hardy’s artworks are both resolutely materialist and infused with a human scale and, more precisely, a human fragility that forces the viewer to confront them as bodies in space.

كوهي ناوا
名和晃平
КОХЕЙ НАВА
foam
Japanese artist Kohei Nawa has immersed visitors at the aichi triennale in undulating sea of bubbling matter, surrounding the walls and floor in porous, cloud-like material. ‘Foam’ inhabits an almost pitch-black room, creating an ethereal quality that seems aesthetically otherworldly walking through the space, the topography of the puffs creates a massive terrain of floating material, stiff enough to stand in place, yet copious in its fragility and delicacy.

КЛЕР МОРГАН
كلير مورجان
克莱尔·摩根
クレア·モーガン
클레어 모건
By the Skin of the Teeth
My work is about our relationship with the rest of nature, explored through notions of change, the passing of time, and the transience of everything around us. For me, creating seemingly solid structures or forms from thousands of individually suspended elements has a direct relation with my experience of these forces. There is a sense of fragility and a lack of solidity that carries through all the sculptures.

海伦查德威克
ヘレン·チャドウィック
헬렌 채드윅
Хелен Чедвик
Vanitas II
In this self-portrait, Chadwick uses her own body to examine the politics and associations surrounding female portraiture and the nude. There is a direct reference to the long tradition in art of female Vanitas figures, contemplating their own image in a mirror. They illustrate the fragility of physical beauty and all human creation.
Here, the artist gazes into a mirror, which reflects one of her works, the Oval Court installation, her own ‘Garden of Delights’. It is a defiant image, confronting the inevitable process of change but not as a de-personalised or idealised nude. Rather she portrays herself as a creator in control of her own image.

Клер Морган
كلير مورجان
克莱尔·摩根
クレア·モーガン
클레어 모건
Lo
My work is about our relationship with the rest of nature, explored through notions of change, the passing of time, and the transience of everything around us. For me, creating seemingly solid structures or forms from thousands of individually suspended elements has a direct relation with my experience of these forces. There is a sense of fragility and a lack of solidity that carries through all the sculptures.