Plato’s Atlantis
“En regardant en arrière sur la collection printemps 2010 d’Alexander McQueen, intitulée Plato’s Atlantis, il est facile de lire la série comme un ancêtre de la révolution du streaming de la mode, un héraut de la mode biomorphique et biophilique, et le précurseur de notre obsession pour les chaussures vraiment assez bizarres. Le recul nous dit également que ce défilé monolithique captivant était le dernier de McQueen”. Steff Yotka
SHOW STUDIO:Nick Knight
Cryptic Ruins
It’s the year 21020 and a mysterious archaeological site has been uncovered in what was central London. A large communal structure seemingly dedicated to unproductive expending of energy from human bodies. Whilst we might easily identify it as a gym, our descendants are concerned with why it exists at all. By framing the 21st century compulsion towards physical fitness as a mysterious practice of the past that requires decoding, Deja’s playful film reveals something of the absurdity of contemporary urban life and questions the rationality of our obsessions.
The Collector
Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas, Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a New York-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores contemporary notions of narcissism, obsession and intimacy, and society’s alienating addiction to modern technological advances and media.
振り子の合唱団
Pendulum Choir
Pendulum Choir is an original choral piece for 9 A Cappella voices and 18 hydraulic jacks. The choir stands on tilting platforms, constituting a living, sonorous body. That body expresses itself through various physical states. Its plasticity varies at the mercy of its sonority. It varies between abstract sounds, repetitive sounds, and lyrical or narrative sounds. The bodies of the singers and their voices play with and against gravity. They brush and avoid each other creating subtle vocal polyphonies. Or, supported by electronic sounds, they break their cohesion and burst into lyrical flight or fold up into an obsessional and dark ritual. The organ travels from life to death in a robotic allegory where the technological complexity and the lyricism of the moving bodies combine into a work with Promethean accents.
Anonymous Women
In the latest narratives, “Demise,” the woman becomes the victim of domestic disasters. Her activities, obsessions and objects are overwhelming her. Her home has become a site of tragedy. The scenes of her heartbreaking end are loosely inspired by several sources including the game of clue, where murder occurs in one of five rooms of the house: Dining Room, Kitchen, Hall, Conservatory, and Library.
Hosotan
Hijikata conceived of Ankoku Butoh from its origins as an outlaw form of dance-art, and as constituting the negation of all existing forms of Japanese dance. Inspired by the criminality of the French novelist Jean Genet, Hijikata wrote manifestoes of his emergent dance form with such as titles as ‘To Prison’. His dance would be one of corporeal extremity and transmutation, driven by an obsession with death, and imbued with an implicit repudiation of contemporary society and media power. Many of his early works were inspired by figures of European literature such as the Marquis de Sade and the Comte de Lautréamont, as well as by the French Surrealist movement, which had exerted an immense influence on Japanese art and literature, and had led to the creation of an autonomous and influential Japanese variant of Surrealism, whose most prominent figure was the poet Shuzo Takiguchi, who perceived Ankoku Butoh as a distinctively ‘Surrealist’ dance-art form.
سارة بوكانان
Empire of the Clouds is a dramatic futuristic representation of aviation achievements, throughout the past, present and future. Inspired by the true design innovation and achievement from machines of flight throughout the entirety of the concept. Focusing on model making to gain a unique perspective and develop an understanding of the overwhelming human drive, almost obsession, to achieve what we cannot do naturally, to fly. Passionate about research Buchanan has a meticulous attitude towards uncovering all elements in a concept. In this collection it enabled a distinctive perspective to a large subject, creating a concept based around model making and accessibility of a globally collective dream.
阿恩史云逊
Арне Свенсон
THE NEIGHBORS
Arne Svenson is self taught as a photographer, but his sensibility was largely formed by his early work as a therapist/educator working with severely disabled children. His vision embraces the unusual, quirky individuality of people and places and represents them with beauty, clarity and reverence. He creates most of his work within the controlled environment of the studio, and even when he ventures out to record the world, his vision is informed by the interior quality of his studio. Svenson works serially and obsessively on discrete projects which vary greatly, yet share these qualities. A sense of humor and fatalism allows Svenson to move freely from one obsession to the next, always manifest with extreme craft, diligence and love.
Bangkok-born artist Tintin Cooper‘s collages weave different images in popular media, such as sporting figures, to cut away the different faces and obscuring their identity. The themes of her work highlight society’s obsession with celebrity, and undermines this illusion by forming work that seems to shatter her subjects from within.
أليس أندرسون
爱丽丝·安德森
アリス·アンダーソン
앨리스 앤더슨
АЛИСА АНДЕРСОН
enrouler le temps
British filmmaker and artist Alice Anderson creates work by concentrating on her childhood from where her obsession of doll’s, and particularly hair, comes from. Her installations reflect her mother/daughter relationship during her isolation in her childhood. During that time Anderson would invent rituals to calm herself down by making threads out of undone seams – later her own hair – and twirling them around her own body and objects. As a natural red-head, she solely focuses on using red doll hair to make small and impressive large scale sculptures.
Лукас Самарас
卢卡斯·萨马拉斯
لوكاس ساماراس
ルーカスサマラス
루카스 사마라스
Chair
Since the 1960s, Lucas Samaras has devoted his art to the evocation of an intensely private, obsessional, sometimes hallucinatory realm. Among the many motifs that occur in his work, the chair is especially prominent. The “Chair Transformation” series has included provocative sculptures executed in a variety of materials including wood, wire mesh, and mirrored glass. Throughout the series, Samaras transforms the ordinary object into a fantastical one, evoking a dreamlike metamorphosis. Here the artist suggests an animated flight of stacked chairs. A deceptively simple form, the sculpture appears from different viewpoints to be upright, leaning back, or springing forward.
For a long time architect and artist Guy Dessauges had an obsession. Preoccupied as he was by the fact that our predecessors, including the Romans, often lived in semi-cylindrical shaped buildings (caves being a good example) he wanted to take it to the next level and design completely cylindrical buildings.
SPIEGEL
‘I like to challenge my obsessions by imposing new rules on them,’ he says. The easy way is never an option: ‘I like things difficult, so as to be able to enjoy it afterwards and to be able to say that it was all worthwhile.’
Which is why, after 25 years of Ultima Vez, Vandekeybus still loves creating performances. ‘Sometimes I can’t face the start of the process. There’s always that stress and sleepless nights with five ideas running around in my head at the same time, but then the production’s own world takes shape and it instantly becomes captivating and fun again.’
Canary
Les grimpeurs ne prêtent pas leurs cordes. Ils doivent leur faire confiance, connaître leurs antécédents d’utilisation, leur usure, leur élasticité et leur durabilité. Les différentes couleurs de cordes représentent des usages spécifiques. Accroché à flanc de montagne, c’est un soulagement de savoir quoi ou qui est au bout de quelle corde. Canary est basé sur l’histoire de l’élevage des oiseaux, qui est une métaphore directe du mélange pictural des couleurs. L’obsession de créer l’oiseau rouge au début du XXe siècle est comme l’objectif d’une peinture monochromatique parfaite. Les notions d’amélioration raciale ont des liens avec la discussion contemporaine sur l’éthique de la génétique. J’ai également considéré le lien entre la pureté de la forme moderne et le point de vue idéaliste. Lorsqu’un tableau ou une œuvre de sculpture est réduit à sa surface, il est idéalisé pour n’être que ce que nous y voyons. Le motif visuel d’une œuvre ne sert que de composition.
Antidote
Dans l’Odyssée, Pénélope tisse parce qu’elle sait que l’accès au mythos (discours des hommes), lui est d’emblée fermé. Sa toile constitue alors un langage essentiellement féminin, qui sonde le rapport au temps et surtout à la mémoire, sans cesse menacée. Mais quelle toile pourrait «tisser» une Pénélope contemporaine à l’ère numérique? Quel désir, quelle obsession, quelle histoire pourrait-elle raconter ? C’est bien à elle que ce premier film brodé est dédié, ainsi qu’au fantasme d’Ulysse : Une femme espère le retour d’un homme qu’elle n’a pas revu depuis de longues années. Elle cherche son visage parmi d’autres, l’imagine, essaye de le reconstituer à travers la trame de sa toile et celle de sa mémoire.
the liquid room
Elizabeth Ogilvie is a Scottish artist who uses water as a medium and as a research focus. Water is the obsession which returns in most of her works and it becomes experience through the use of installations and videos. Her work embraces universal and timeless concerns, offering her public an innocent pleasure and at the same time underlining philosophical and ecological issues.
Through her installations, the artist isolates water inside an artificial state, creating a process which highlights its fundamental qualities in order to return to its place of origin which is the natural habitat. Among her most important works there is Liquid Room realized in 2002. Inside a derelict warehouse the artist created basins with water which were crossed by a footbridge. By linking art, architecture and science, she realized an interactive installation where the visitor, walking on the footbridge, can touch the water, whose movement is reflected on the walls of the installation. In 2006 she created Bodies of Water, whose operation took over from her previous work.
Once again, through a series of installations, the public was able to share the experience of sensorial involvement within an environment dominated by water.
