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...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
War Footage is a series of wall-mounted works composed of 16mm film leader, tightly bound to flag-shaped panels by the artist...
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...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
Malani draws upon her personal experience of the violent legacy of colonialism and de-colonization in India in this personal narrative that was shown as a colossal six channel video installation at dOCUMENTA (13), but is here adapted to single channel...
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...