83.82 x 115.57 x 10.16 cm.
Agnieszka Kurant’s Placebo VIII brings together a series of imaginary pharmaceuticals invented within the fictional narratives of literature and film. Displayed in a custom cabinet, these imaginary drugs are materialized as physical objects, packaged in meticulously designed boxes, listing dosage and description information along with references to the fictional source. Each box is filled with placebo tablets. The project is suggestive of the ways that fiction and popular culture affects how we experience reality. Placebos, or pills without active ingredients, can have powerful effects, and news scientific studies show that placebos can be used to treat some illnesses. For example, in some countries they are used by doctors to treat chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. Metaphorically, the work suggests the power of belief, and draws an association with the symbolic field of art. The work might also be seen as an oblique reference to and comment on the often un-critical culture of over-the-counter prescription drug-use (and abuse) in the US.
Conceptual interdisciplinary artist, Agnieszka Kurant explores how complex social, economic and cultural systems can operate in ways that confuse distinctions between fiction and reality or nature and culture. She investigates “the economy of the invisible,” in which immaterial and imaginary entities, fictions, phantoms and emergent processes influence political and economic systems. Kurant probes the “unknown unknowns” of knowledge and the speculations and exploits of capitalism by integrating elements of science and philosophy, and analyzing certain phenomena—collective intelligence, emergence, virtual capital, immaterial and digital labor, evolution of memes, civilizations and social movements, artificial societies, energy circuits and the editing process—as political acts. She explores the hybrid and shifting status of objects in relation to value, aura, authorship, production and circulation. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms, self-organized complex systems or bachelor machines.
This work, a large oil painting on canvas, shows a moment from Amorales’s eight-minute two-channel video projection Useless Wonder (2006)...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor, through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
Mariana Castillo Deball’s set of kill hole plates are part of a larger body of work problematizing archeological narratives, and drawing attention to the conservation process and its role in recreating an imagined object...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Zeppelintribüne (2002) was shot near the Zepelintribune in Nuremberg, designed by Albert Speer, chief architect of the Third Reich...