Inextinguishable fire
The title of the piece references Harun Farocki’s 1969 film of the same name, which approaches the impossible task of effectively depicting the horror of napalm on film. Cassils’s gesture of self-immolation speaks to both the desire for–and the impossibility of–knowing such horror, even while decisively aiming to approach it. Though the stunt is a simulation of violence, it still presents real danger. This possibly volatile situation–and the attempt to control it–is captured to create an image where danger, empathy for those experiencing violence, and the privilege of removal from such circumstance operate simultaneously in one transparent performance.

光
光正在使用高精度激光在屏幕上绘制连续的抽象形状，并与声音完美同步。强烈的光线与完全的黑暗形成对比，缓慢的动作和微小细节的演化与强而有力的手势一样重要。结果既是古朴的又是未来主义的。新兴的模式为许多可能的解释留出了空间。象形文字，一种未知语言的符号，建筑图纸，数据点之间的连接或类似Tron的早期视频游戏放大了1000倍。

.

Light

Light is using high-precision lasers to draw continuous abstract shapes on the screen, perfectly synchronized with the sound. Intense light contrasts with total darkness, and slow movements and the evolution of small details are as important as strong gestures. The result is both quaint and futuristic. Emerging models leave room for many possible explanations. Hieroglyphs, symbols in an unknown language, architectural drawings, connections between data points, or early video games like Tron are magnified 1,000 times.

.

Lumière

La lumière utilise des lasers de haute précision pour dessiner des formes abstraites continues sur l’écran, parfaitement synchronisées avec le son. La lumière forte contraste avec l’obscurité totale, le ralenti et l’évolution des petits détails sont aussi importants que les gestes forts. Le résultat est à la fois pittoresque et futuriste. Les modèles émergents laissent place à de nombreuses explications possibles. Les hiéroglyphes, les symboles dans une langue inconnue, les dessins d’architecture, les connexions entre les points de données ou les premiers jeux vidéo comme Tron sont agrandis 1 000 fois.

توماس هيرشهورن
托马斯·赫塞豪恩
תומס הירשהורן
トーマス·ヒルシュホルン
abschlag

Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Abschlag” installation, which occupies the first room on the main floor, offers a lesson in how not to engage with the Russian milieu: the Swiss artist constructed part of a typical Petersburg apartment block out of cardboard inside the full-height space, ripped off its façade, and deposited the refuse at its base, revealing shabby interiors lined with original avant-garde masterpieces (on loan from the nearby Russian Museum) by the likes of Malevich and El Lissitky. The references allude to a politically radical Russian past; the construction debris acts as a metaphor for history. Though Hirschhorn suggests a recovery of the revolutionary communist spirit of the 1920s, he falls prey to a historically revisionist fetish: citing the Russian avant-garde as a generative point for vanguard culture in the West, and offering it as a source for renewed progressivism in Russia. Hirschhorn seems woefully unaware of the Putin government’s branding campaign, one that aims to sell the Russian avant-guard as a nationalist movement in line with the regime’s own values (perhaps he didn’t watch the Sochi opening ceremony). Hirschhorn ultimately proves Zhilayev right — with its political pretenses, “Abschlag” aspires to make a grand gesture against conservatism, but fails because its critique has already been co-opted..
.

Intuit
The movements of one individual effect the balance of the piece so greatly that the other person must move to balance the sculpture. ‘Our bodies are constantly adapting and bending to the configurations of buildings and the designs of transportation. In recent drawings, urban blueprints fuse with human anatomical representation… I emphasize on the ideas of flexibility and lightness. The machines I build serve to express the elegance of a gesture, a finite moment of equilibrium.’ Eve Bailey

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

Specimen Box

The OCR began work on Specimen Box in 2014 at the request of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit. Microsoft’s Cybercrime Center monitors communications coming from hundreds of millions of PCs around the world that have become infected by botnet malware. Employing data sonification together with advanced visualization techniques, Specimen Box provides a configurable multi-sensory presentation of botnet signal activity in real time. It also features a multitouch gesture-based interface for navigating, exploring, selecting, and examining the billions of signals that have previously been collected. Users can access the collected signals based on their activity levels, the geographic locations of their sources, or their daily activity patterns over time, using clustering to group sources with similar behavior.

Field of Infinity

Inspired by both Italian Renaissance paintings and contemporary news broadcasts of protests at the border of Gaza with Israel – the work processes human gestures and figures in a landscape into a dark and colorful mix, opening up a series of reflections on the political image, the image of the political, the politics of the image, and the image of the image.

file sao paulo 2019 videoart

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”

جنيفر روبل
제니퍼 루벨
ジェニファールベル
Portrait of the Artist

Jennifer Rubell, the American artist and niece of Studio 54 co-founder Steve Rubell, brings a maternal touch to this year’s Frieze Art Fair with her autobiographical piece Portrait of the Artist. The pristine white nude, cast from steel-reinforced fibreglass, reclines like an odalisque at the Stephen Friedman Gallery stand. The sculpture is a replica of Rubell’s own eight-months-pregnant body, except it is eight metres high: the large belly, which is carved out to leave an egg-shaped void, can accommodate a fully grown adult. Spectators are able to clamber into the artwork and curl up inside as if they are the artist’s unborn child.Rubell’s intention was to create a monumental gesture of unconditional motherly love. There is a feminist statement here, too: Rubell has appropriated a style and scale historically reserved for male leaders to show, she says, “an emotion that is intensely personal and un-heroic”. The artist adds that watching members of the Frieze audience enter in the sculpture’s womb is “tremendously satisfying” – in her eyes the enlarged form was “incomplete until the first viewer entered”. Amid the hustle of Frieze’s mini-city there is something undeniably appealing about the opportunity to put your feet up in the foetal position in the name of art. Not to mention the comfort factor.