Factory of the sun
In this immersive work, which debuted at the 2015 German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Steyerl probes the pleasures and perils of image circulation in a moment defined by the unprecedented global flow of data. Ricocheting between genres—news reportage, documentary film, video games, and internet dance videos—Factory of the Sun uses the motifs of light and acceleration to explore what possibilities are still available for collective resistance when surveillance has become a mundane part of an increasingly virtual world. Factory of the Sun tells the surreal story of workers whose forced moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine.

蒂姆·霍金森
ティム·ホーキンソン
تيم هاوكينسون
Möbius Ship
The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel. Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected.

منير فاطمي
Evolution or Death
Fatmi inverts spectacular representations of identity by rendering them mundane and within reach of a subject that may scramble any conclusive narrative. Fatmi’s work counters strategies of interpellation that identifies a subject with an ideology prior to that subject’s ability to place their identity in or beyond a particular ideology. Fatmi parodies the various interpellations of colonialism and capitalism that seek to define others according to symbolic narratives. In Evolution or Death, 2004, (fig. 4) two Anglo-European looking subjects imitate suicide bombers with books and papers taped around their abdomens. One holds open a trenchcoat and another holds up a book that looks like a detonator attached to wires. Fatmi reverses the situation. These are not the suicide-bombers from Arab and Muslim countries. Instead, they appear to be of European descent in a European street or modern room in casual clothing.

Noa is fascinated by the tension between harmony and chaos, tradition and innovation, sensitively seeking for the perfect balance. She likes to observe and look for the uniqueness and beauty in the mundane and ordinary. uniqueness and beauty in the mundane and ordinary.

雷切尔·佩里韦尔蒂
Lost In My Life
American artist Rachel Perry Welty makes use of the scads of everyday items we tend to throw away in her new ‘Lost in my Life’ series. She layers the often overlooked items to create a whole new textured landscape. “Most of us don’t pay much attention to the mundane objects we use everyday,” explains Welty, “like the twist ties that hold the plastic wrap on our bread and the broccoli together or the little paper cups that we pull out of a water dispenser.”

Ear Tone Box
“I am interested in transforming various mundane objects into speakers. Listening to sound through a cardboard box is very different from listening through a chair, which is very different from listening through computer speakers. In these works, I am attempting to expand aural dimensions by orchestrating flexible listening situations, which draw attention to the materiality and variation of sound as filtered through these objects.”

Measuring Angst
Measuring Angst is a robotic sculptural installation by artist Jonathan Schipper that simulates the mundane act of throwing a glass bottle across a room into a brick wall. The event happens in slow motion, taking nearly 12 minutes to complete as the bottle rotates slowly through the gallery space and then gradually explodes into smaller fragments before rewinding and starting again.

Explosion
In these photographs by Joschi Herczeg and Daniele Kaehr, the artistic team captures a single, exciting moment in a mundane, domestic surrounding. For this series Explosion, the team synchronized a camera with a custom-built detonator to snap a photo at the exact moment of explosion. The results are these mysterious blobs of light within domestic settings—a cloud hovering over an everyday lamp, a ghostly shape emerging from underneath a doorframe.

Eggbeater
This Eggbeater by Shannon Goff catches the viewer’s attention by its sheer size. Also, the content of the sculpture, an eggbeater, is striking in such a large display. Few people have ever noticed the intricacies of an eggbeater, except perhaps those who engineer the machine. Thus, seeing such a large rendition gives importance to each wheel, each connection in this mundane contraption.

曹斐
ツァオ·フェイ
Чао Фей
Haze and Fog

Cao Fei’s ‘Haze and Fog’ is a new type of zombie movie set in modern China made by one of the most important Chinese artists working today. Working with film, photography, installation and performance Cao Fei probes her personal and cultural relationship to metropolitan China.Rather than positioning activity as good vs evil, Cao Fei’s major new video commission explores how the collective consciousness of people living in the time of what the artist calls “magical metropolises” emerges from seemingly tedious, mundane, day-to-day life. This magic reality is created through a struggle at the tipping point between the visible and the invisible.

Cybernetic Bacteria

In the earliest stages of my work, I was intrigued by normal flora bacteria, the ubiquitous bacteria that live on us, in us, and around us. At the time this area was described as being of no commercial or medical interest – an ideal area for artistic research some might say! It threw into question for me the ways in which our scientific understanding of the world is limited by mundane things like finance, and how the limits of our understanding are drawn by factors other than curiosity.

video

Alone Together

The phrase Alone Together describes a nature of personal relationships and relating to one another that I have found to be characteristic of an experience the generation I am a part of encounters, if not others as well. The phrase in context of communication calls upon the experience and realization that your mental state is completely unique and solitary. There is a push to connect with others as well as to find someone to spend your life with, and along with this push comes the expectation of a complete and total togetherness. There is an eventual point of realization and discovery of your own mental state and its perpetual solitude, transcending physical closeness with others. The photographs in the series evoke contemplation of this experience, through imagery of the mundane, capturing a quiet departure into a somewhat bizarre disconsolate self-investigation. The photographs play with the association of Alone Together to intimacy and love, with an alternate interpretation or redefinition according to newfound phenomenon.

Фрейд Лебайн
A Spring in New York

fred lebain is not scared of the mundane or clichés.
instead, he plays with them, superimposing their images on one another. last spring lebain took images of various areas in new york city, each one of them an occasion of a ‘first visit’ to the location, in which he photographed and then printed in large poster format. later, he returned to the same spots for a second visit, capturing a larger framed shot in which he aligned the poster documenting his first visit to the current scene. these postcard images show lebain’s preference for particular areas of the city, telescoping his views – a time parallax representing the days which separate the two shots – and superimposing his vision of new york. hands, feet or a pair of jeans can be seen… like surrealistic winks, indicating that the photographer is not alone in his mission.

falling into the mundane world