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Frederik Heyman

CEREMONIAL FORMALITY
Frederik Heyman’s work is a balancing act incorporating multiple media – including video, installations and photogaphy – often in a digitally altered environment. In his work, Heyman explores memory and duration, using photogrammetry and 3D scanning to depict and represent the passage of time. The hallmarks of Heyman’s work are mechanical and technological: wires, wheels, scrolling LED marquees, metal frames, clamps, industrial lights, screens and cameras. Bodies–as opposed to humans–are subject to unusual dynamics with these technological trappings. In Ceremonial Formality (2020) a contortionist is encased in a metal cage while a spectator, hooked up to wires, looks on.

MARTIN HESSELMEIER & ANDREAS MUXEL

CAPACITIVE BODY
file festival

The installation “capacitive body” is a modular light system that reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom-built module consists of an electro-luminescent light wire linked to a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. Through its modular setup it can easily be adapted to various urban spaces. The sensors are used to measure vibrations of architectural solids in a range of low frequencies. These oscillations are triggered by surrounding ambient noise, for example traffic noise. The data sensor controls the light wires, which are tensed to a spatial net structure. According to the values of the measurement, light flashes are generated. With increasing vibrations the time between flashes becomes shorter and shorter. The stability of this nervous system gets to an end where it collapses and restarts again. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which creates a visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation.

Fabrice le Nezet

Elasticity
With an urge to constantly explore the intersection between architecture, fashion, and product design, london-based artist Fabrice le Nezet has created ‘Elasticity.’ the work materializes the idea of tension by making the notion of weight and stretch palpable through the use of four massive and abstract metal structures. These components run perpendicularly across the long edges of rectangular voids in the ceiling. by presenting this normal condition, several of the wires bend to support large prisms of concrete that provide a feeling of force and motion. as they drop down to occupy spaces below, movement is emphasized by their strategic orientation below clerestory windows shining light onto the forms. As observers move around the constructs, a contrast is created between the real properties of the materials and the way they are perceived.

TUNDRA

My Whale
There is an impressive space at the front of the ship, with panoramic windshield and hexagonal pattern on the vaulted ceiling, remained from the 80-s, the time, when “Brusov” was constructed in Austria. Standing there gives you the feeling of floating through the reflections of the Krymsky bridge lights on the river, inside a giant whale head. Looking through its eyes, listening to its songs that flow across the brain made of hexagonal cells by the wires hanging down here and there.
With some light and sound we brought this whale to life.
Each piece of the projection onto the cells was cloned from the previous one with a random changes. So each cell behaved differently, pulsating to the rythm of the whale songs. To interract with the whale the visitor could place the phone screen above the black box in the center of the room.

Geumhyung Jeong

Homemade RC Toy
Her new installation centers on five human-scale, remote-control sculptures that she cobbled together from metal brackets, batteries, wires, dental study props, and disassembled mannequins. Surrounding them are stepped plinths whose bright colors echo the robot sculptures’ wiring. The plinths display fetishistic agglomerations of spare parts: wheels, cables, gutted medical practice torsos, home repair parts. In their default state, the sculptures are frozen, comatose, even if all that wiring and machinery certainly suggests movement. The installation is the setting for a series of live interactions between the artist and her uncanny others.

DIANA ENG

INFLATABLE DRESS
Diana Eng, in collaboration with Emily Albinski, created this gorgeous dress way back in 2003, which ended up making its way on the cover of ID Magazine. The designers used this project to explore how they could use electronics to change the shape and color of a gown. The dress inflates to allow you to change it’s shape. Pump up the back or the sides to change its silhouette.
The designers made no attempt to hide the electronics, rather, they exposed the spaghetti-ball of wires and components as the main aesthetic.

HALO

SEMICONDUCTOR
HALO is a large scale immersive artwork which embodies Semiconductor’s ongoing fascination with how we experience the materiality of nature through the lens of science and technology. Taking the form of a large cylinder, the structure houses a 360-degree projection of scientific data while an array of 384 vertical wires are played by the same data, to produce the sound. The work draws the viewer into its centre in order to inhabit the results of particle-collisions, produced by experiments taking place at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Ingo Maurer

Birdie
The original Birdie suspension lamp was designed by Ingo Maurer himself in 2002. Birdie is the smaller version of the Birds Birds Birds chandelier and is suited for ceiling heights of 230 to 260 cm. With 12 halogen low-volt bulbs, extra produced by Ingo Maurer, and handmade wings of goose feathers this lustre becomes an extraordinary design lamp. The individual wires can be turned, bent and shaped whichever way you like.

MOUNIR FATMI

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.

Pia Männikkö

Verges
In Pia Männikkö’s installation Verges the gallery space is completely filled with white tulle fabrics that hang from a grid of metal wires. Viewers are invited to enter the installation. The fabrics are open on all sides so the viewer can freely choose which way to go. The white surroundings affect the viewer’s sense of the space and as a result the viewer cannot exactly locate the edges of the room. Adding to the sense of disorientation, other people moving in the space seem like silhouettes disappearing gradually into the whiteness.

DAVID LETELLIER

Caten
Created for the Saint Sauveur chapel in Caen, Caten is a levitating sculpture, determined by gravity and guiding the evolution of a sound composition.
300 fine wires suspended from two ropes, connected themselves at each end to a slowly rotating arm, form an evanescent surface which interacts with the architecture. By a symbolic mirror effect, the curves of the wires, created by the gravitational force, reflect the shapes of the church arches. Caten opposes the ephemeral to the eternal, the movement to the static, and produce a tension between the lightness and the millenary stability of the space.

NINA CANELL

Temporary Encampment (Five Blue Solids)

The precarious installations of Nina Canell (born 1979 in Växjö, Sweden, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) could be read as essays on changeability and uncertainty. Hinged upon a fabric of electromagnetics, her communities of objects quietly interact with each other through modest arrangements, balancing careful ambitions to sustain certain frequencies, movements or altitudes. Electrical debris, wires and neon gas establish temporary, almost performative sculptural unions with natural findings such as water, wood or stones, yielding open-ended moments of synchronicity. An improvisational methodology and a flexibility of form highlight Canell’s quest for sculpture, which exists somewhere in between the material and the immaterial, forming and questioning the conductive relations between solid objects and mental events.
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Kevin Beasley

Strange Fruit
Using both sculpture and musical performance in his practice, Kevin Beasley explores the physical materiality and cultural connotations of both objects and sound. His sculptures typically incorporate everyday items like clothing, housewares, or sporting goods, bound together using tar, foam, resin, or other materials. Often they also contain embedded audio equipment that warps and amplifies the ambient tones of their surroundings. For Storylines, Beasley has created two new works specifically for the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building. Within this vast and open sonic environment, Strange Fruit (Pair 1) and Strange Fruit (Pair 2) (both 2015) offer an experience of intimacy, absorbing and reflecting the sound of the crowd at the scale of a personal conversation. Each work embodies this spirit of dialogue in its two-part structure—at its core are two athletic shoes, one merged with microphones, the other with speakers. Suspending these objects in space, Beasley compounds their technological interchange with additional layers of meaning, bringing to mind the urban phenomenon of shoes hanging from overhead wires or poles (itself an open-ended form of communication). At the same time the works’ titles refer to history of lynchings in the American South memorialized by Bronx schoolteacher Abel Meerepol in the 1937 protest song “Strange Fruit.” In these contexts, the hanging forms of Beasley’s sculptures resonate not only with his body, which molded them by hand, or with the bodies moving through the museum, but also with those inscribed in the problematic history of race and class in the United States.