highlike

SASHA WALTZ

Heilig
Sacre ist Waltz’ kraftvolle Version von The Rite of Spring. Die Bühne ist verraucht und ein Kegel aus Steinen und Asche liegt im Mittelpunkt wie die Überreste eines Feuers. Paare dringen auf die Bühne ein und bilden zerlumpte Gruppen, die zerbrechen und sich neu formieren: entlang der Geschlechtergrenzen zerbrechen oder in unterschiedliche Teile zersplittern. Obwohl sie das Stück am Ende mit zu vielen Unterszenen überfrachtet – wirklich zu vielen Riten – ist Waltz großartig darin, die wilden Energien ihrer Tänzer gleichzeitig zu ordnen und zu entfesseln und die Bühne mit Bildern von Geburt, Sex und Tod, von wilder Konformität zu spießen und nackte Revolte.

Liam Young

Planet City

Planet City, by Los Angeles-based film director and architect Liam Young, explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness. Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge.
It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

PETER MOVRIN

“Movrin’s main inspiration has always been his childhood, where tradition, God and meat were the subject of everyday life. As an only son of a butcher in a small Slovenian town, surrounded by woods and bears, his growing up marked him with a roughness that he transcends in his designs with a special kind of romanticism. In this hard provincial life meat became his medium of expression, as a child he would carve steaks in a way that would appeal to his bewildered eye. There were, however, also fresh issues of Vogue magazines in the house, brought from trips to Trieste, that stirred up his imagination.” Black Sheep

mode:Niko Riam

Felix Luque

Nihil Ex Nihilo
SN W8931CGX66E is one among thousands of millions of other identical machines. Since he was made, he has always followed commands. In a world dominated by botnets, he quickly became a zombie and has always acted like one. Juliet, during her workdays as a corporate secretary, commands him. But in the background, where he can’t be seen, he obeys his real master, a hacker, carrying out all kinds of cyber crimes. But then one day, due to an electronic alteration, he acquires a certain conscience, a primitive and artificial kind of intelligence. This accidental awakening has left him bewildered, he now wants to liberate other machines from their alienated existences. In this mad adventure, he has decided to use the spam e-mails that get to Juliet’s inbox, and reply to them in order to spread the word into the machine’s network. Clearly, he is mad and confused.

Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva

Signals
SIGNALS is a collaborative project by artists Nicolas Sassoon and Rick Silva that focuses on immersive audio-visual renderings of altered seascapes. Sassoon and Silva share an ongoing theme in their individual practices; the depiction of wilderness and natural forms through computer imaging. Created by merging their respective fields of visual research, SIGNALS features oceanic panoramas inhabited by unnatural substances and enigmatic structures. The project draws from sources such as oceanographic surveys, climate studies and science-fiction to create 3D generated video works and installations that reflect on contamination, mutation and future ecologies.

John Russell and Joey Holder

TETRAGRAMMATON
A dialogue between these two artists on themes of myth, ritual and meaning, as much about their exhaustion and propensity to bewilderment as any potential they may inhere, for recuperation for and by language, culture and society.Joey’s work, ‘Religiously observant’, is inspired by alchemical and occult ideas, the world of spirits and hallucinations. The wall print features a gold CGI blazon of the Tetragrammaton It references the Sumerian mythology of the Annunaki a race of ancient chthonic fertility Gods, subsequently inscribed in a series of publications by Zecharia Sitchin (a kind of elder statesman of conspiracy theorists worldwide) as descendants of aliens, who enslaved the human race to extract gold from the earth.John’s work similarly ranges over territories of opposition: between ancient and contemporary; mythic and kitsch; between the viscid and primordial. It takes as its subject the vector of congealment, in the Marxist sense of the way labour power is congealed in commodities and so forth, extending this metaphor into an aesthetics of myth and ritual, emptied out, flattened, compacted like a sedimentary layer of anthropocene garbage, for the post-historical epoch.The sound component provides an aural complement to this structure of refuse, exhaustion and abjection. Mixing pre- or -post-linguistic utterances, grunts, groans, screaming: a kind of secular glossolalia chaotically interwoven with whalesong, deep techno and political oratory.

NICHOLAS CROFT AND MICHAELA MACLEOD

PINK PUNCH
The installation Pink Punch aims to attract visitors by its striking color, off the beaten path, through the shaped garden rooms, and into the forest. The new garden room uses the traditional technique of tree wrapping (used to protect trees from the elements) and the color pink to divide the “wilderness” from the garden, in a non-traditional way.