Echo Kicked Drum

source: galerierodolphejanssen

Davide Balula was born in 1978, and currently lives and works between Paris and New York. His work is articulated around sound, electronic, and visual devices. The participation of the viewer is often required to activate his pieces. Familiar objects and forms are taken out of their practice crosses visual and sound and complete the musical aspect of his activities.

Endowed with an impressive capacity for enquiry, Davide Balula is interested in technology, biochemical and physical processes and essentially all phenomena at the limits of reason. Tinnitus, plants, insects or sect, he digs deep into these subjects as a starting point to his work in a documentary practice which has become the fertiliser of his imagination.

His works play with normative systems and inverse the usual relationships between elements. In that way, they put knowledge and the results of perception into perspective. Davide Balula uses the progress of science in order to produce new knowledge of the world, knowledge with neither nostalgia nor regret for the period of utopianism. Dependant on an ironic relativism, playing with the possibility of disturbing the rules of the game, he makes unexpected connections as in his work “Troubles” (Disturbances), a pigment imprint from a website which degenerates after each visit.

Balula works with exploding welcome cocktails, with neon, with electrified apples, with plotted computer pictures, atomic clocks and inflatable tarpaulins. He uses ice melted into bizarre shapes, magnetic mixers in test-tubes, voice-recorders in Samsonite cases, and devices used in nuclear power plants to professionally disinfect mucous membranes. He works with human heartbeats that withered nettles cause to transport more serotonin than is good for them.

Balula works with such conflicting materials that it becomes impossible to identify him with just one of them. He is out for the event that remains unlikely even as it happens. He leverages the remote with all its consequences. Sometimes he burns up and splashes all his material resources. Sometimes Balula just lets his campaigns go out… The debris of his red firecrackers remains scattered on the floor.

Hear, feel, see this time which cannot be defined. Such is one of Davide Balula’s concerns, behind the apparent poetry of a practice which fixes itself no limits, neither in its domains nor in its processes. His work is not experimental in the sense of the practices of the sixties or seventies, but has integrated the polyphony of mediums from the very start, with the naturalness of a multiform practice.
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source: cnp-laorg

Davide Balula was born in 1978, and currently lives and works between Paris and New York. His work is articulated around sound, electronic, and visual devices. The participation of the viewer is often required to activate his pieces. Familiar objects and forms are taken out of their context, in artworks where the border between reality and simulation disappears. His artistic practice crosses visual and sound and complete the musical aspect of his activities (albums on the French label Active Suspension in particular).
He has held solo shows at Frank Elbaz, Paris; Fake Estate, New York, and Confort Moderne in Poitier among others. He also recently staged performances at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Pompidou Museum, Paris; and Performa, New York, and was part of numerous group exhibition including, the Pompidou Museum, Paris; Eleven Rivington, New York, Thadeous Ropac, Paris, MassMOCA, MOCA Miami,MAC/VAL, Vitry Sur Seine, Songwon Art Center, Seoul, Fondation Cartier, Paris, Bieledefer Kunstverein, Germany.