The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009. In this film, Aiken’s allusion to “the frontier” and iconic imagery like the cowboy suggest that the American West Coast as a cultural construction. These notions are reinforced by two key elements in the film: its protagonist, the iconic West Coast artist Ed Ruscha, and its reference to the cinematic and the experience of the movie theater. The film is structured as a journey in time, from day to night. The completed film was shot in different places around the globe, including Los Angeles, Rome, South Africa, and Israel, which suggests the blurring boundaries of the unknown and emphasizes both fictive and real landscapes.
Doug Aitken’s work started to draw international attention when his installation Electric Earth earned the International Prize at the 1999 Venice Biennale, which was organized by renowned Swiss curator Harald Szeemann. Interested in breaking conventional narratives, Aitken emphasizes circularity and non-linearity in his monumental site-specific installations. This monumentality is usually expressed in Aitken’s tendency to combine apparently disconnected fragments in order to create epic films. Although this aspect of his work differs from the all-encompassing wholes sought by modernism, Aitken’s films play with the imaginary and surreal in a way that flirts with the notion of utopia. The artist uses pop culture and, especially, the film industry as sources for his compelling and immersive environments. Aesthetic elements such as coloration, light and space and a careful editing process give his films a contemplative mood.
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
Sarcastically titled to call attention to the problematic notions underlying colonialism, this photograph shows hundreds of Native Malaysians seated quietly behind one of their colonial oppressors...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Gypsy shows an ambivalent scene, in which broken blinds and its unsmiling subject are balanced with the stilllife plentitude of watermelon slices and the beautifully lit nudity of the sitter...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Memory: Record/Erase is a stop-motion animation by Nalini Malani based on ‘The Job,’ a short story by celebrated German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht...