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Sammy Baloji
Part-skyscraper, part-pyramid, part-citadel, this unfinished and ragged twelve-story building stands, incongruously, among the industrial environment of Limete. Towering above this desultory landscape and defying gravitational laws and urban zoning rules, this uncommon architectural proposition forms one of the strangest and most enigmatic landmarks of the city. A giant question mark, it begs for profound reflection on the nature of the city, the heritage of its colonial modernist architecture, the dystopian nature of its infrastructure, and the capacity for utopian urban dreams and lines of flight that it nonetheless continues to generate.
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Ciprian Muresan
Ciprian Muresan asked a group of protagonists to wear a monk’s robe and copy a certain number of artworks and texts from exhibition catalogues. Here it is no longer the Bible that is reproduced but works by Malevich, Mondrian, Beuys, Duchamp. These artists represent a certain form of utopia in art and are themselves quasi-mythical figures.
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Clemens von Wedemeyer
Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people. The opening of the film presents us with a dramatic process that transforms the documentary image. The lack of human presence makes creates a strange atmosphere in the film.
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Szabolcs Kisspál
Lifesize Draft is the second of two sculptures on a similar theme, the first one being Utopia Battery, (2008). The latter is also in an edition of 3, one of which is in the collection of the Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest. Although Lifesize Draft was made after Utopia Battery, Kisspal conceived it more or less at the same time and sees the two works as closely related.
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Rindon Johnson
Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire.
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Julius Koller
This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created. His “Anti-Happenings” turned mundane events into ‘cultural’ and ‘subjective’ situations. He sought to create new cultural situations that weren’t new art, but rather new ways of living: a new creativity for a new humanistic culture.
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Chitra Ganesh
Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)
Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream . This series by artist Chitra Ganesh comprises a large-scale narrative suite inspired by a 1905 feminist utopian (eponymous) text written by a Bengali writer and social reformer, Rokeya Sakhhawat Hossain. Educated thanks to the support of her elite family, Hossain was one of the few Bengali women of her generation writing in English.
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Elisheva Biernoff
In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs. Although the imagery present in her work might seem nostalgic upon first encounter, Biernoff’s complex tableaux often reveal the artist’s skeptical look towards her subjects matters. They Were Here (2010), constitutes a clear example.
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Cao Fei
Since 2007, Cao Fei has radically focused her work on Second Life, an online space that virtually mimics “the real world” and includes everything from the expression of ideas to economic investment. Referring to China’s modernization and its capitalist and utopic visions, RMB City explores the ways in which global communication impacts imagination, values, and ways of life. By appropriating virtual reality, Cao Fei opens up a new frontier in the field of art production that surpasses conventional materiality and invites collaboration and exchanges with her public and clients.
Cao Fei
- location: Beijing, China
- year born: 1978
- gender: female
- nationality: Chinese
- home town: Guangzhou, China
Julius Koller
- location: Pieštany, Slovenská Republika
- year born: 1939
- gender: male
- nationality: Slovakian
Clemens von Wedemeyer
- location: Göttingen, Deutschland
- year born: 1974
- gender: male
- nationality: German
Ciprian Muresan
Ciprian Muresan appropriates historical, political, social and cultural (essentially artistic, literary and cinematographic) references which he re-contextualizes...
Rindon Johnson
Rindon Johnson’s work in sculpture, video, poetry, and virtual reality deals with technologies that enable captivity and the harnessing and transformation of nature from a gender- and race-critical perspective...
Chitra Ganesh
Spanning printmaking, sculpture, and video, Chitra Ganesh’s work draws from broad-ranging material and historic reference points, including surrealism, expressionism, Hindu, Greek and Buddhist iconographies, South Asian pictorial traditions, 19th-century European portraiture and fairy tales, comic books, song lyrics, science fiction, Bollywood posters, news and media images...
Sammy Baloji
Sammy Baloji explores the cultural, architectural and industrial heritage of the Katanga region in Congo...
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1970-1979
Julius Koller
1978This work is one of Koller’s many variations which he began to use from 1970 to describe the ‘cultural situations’ he created...
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2000-2009
Clemens von Wedemeyer
2003Silberhöhe , directed at Halle, located in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic), is the name of a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, which was built in the 70’s and could accommodate more 40,000 people...
Szabolcs Kisspál
2009Lifesize Draft is the second of two sculptures on a similar theme, the first one being Utopia Battery, (2008)...
Elisheva Biernoff
2009In her recent work, Biernoff is interested in investigating fictions and fantasies embedded in the remnants of consumer culture (for example magazines) or through ephemera such as postcards and old photographs...
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2010-2019
Ciprian Muresan
2011Ciprian Muresan asked a group of protagonists to wear a monk’s robe and copy a certain number of artworks and texts from exhibition catalogues...
Chitra Ganesh
Drawing & Print
2018(Drawing & Print) Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream ...
Rindon Johnson
Advanced Technology
2019(Advanced Technology) The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100...