Jennilee Marigomen

Work from Absent and From the See.

“Jennilee’s Marigomen’s work investigates everyday urban phenomenon. The tension between the natural world and urban intervention permeate her images with a playful undertone. Her visceral and sedative environments highlight the fleeting extraordinary.” – Jennilee Marigomen

Helen Mirra

Work from her oeuvre.

“My work can perhaps be described as conceptual ecology, or pragmatist artmaking. My disparate though generally minimalist practice occurs in varied scrap media. In various ways, moreover, I’ve been thinking in my making life about the relationships between scale, time spans, modesty and bluntness. I build in a simple way, trying to engage with the objects and ideas I find compelling so as to provoke and complicate my own thought processes. I hope that the things I make can command attention without asking for it.

Neither a specialist nor a generalist, I feel free to move between research interests, and to keep my investigations unrestricted. With sea-, rail-, and foot-transport as subjects, I’ve developed projects, and objects, in proximate relation to cartography, geography and geology. I approach the forest and the library similarly, treating language and visuality as an amalgam. Whatever the object of concern—a blanket, book, rock, or shipping pallet—I have always perceived physical, aesthetic thingness as being simultaneous with and of equal import to intellectual and emotional information. I imagine that my practice might hone how we perceive and order our knowledge of the world.

A natural consequence of my process is that I often find myself pulling ideas conceived elsewhere into another form. I have composed music based on Friedrich Froebel’s original kindergarten system; developed indexes that variously transpose books by novelist W.G. Sebald, activist Jane Addams, and Pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James; made paintings and sculptures alongside the microscripts of the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, as a response to them and a way better to perceive their ways of making meaning. In such projects, and in my approach to ideas and to things, I am as much an editor as an author: it is important to me that the given or found should remain evident, even as I make various kinds of decisions—editorial, compositional, or other—upon or with the given.” – Helen Mirra

Full research statement here.

Tara Kelton

Work from Hypnotic Consumption, Weather Shifts, and Human Filter.

Hypnotic Consumption is a recontextualization of animated GIFs. Link here.

Weather Shifts – “Applies current temperature and wind conditions to Google satellite images at any zip code input by user. The wind speed determines how far the images are ‘blown’, and the temperature determines their level of saturation. Transforms images of perennially pleasant weather into dynamic reflections of reality. Depicted here are zipcodes in Texas, Arizona, Alaska and New York.”

Human Filter – “A chat program containing a human filter. Each time a user sends a message it is rerouted as audio data to a non-native speaker of English who transcribes the message and then sends it to its originally intended destination. Errors that occur through this process cause the conversation between the two users to degrade over time. A chat between Melissa Levin and Lauren Harden, with Hyoun Youl Joe as the filter. Each mistranslated message is overlaid on the user’s original message as soon as it has been received, letting the user know that a scrambling has occured without showing them exactly what was communicated, or miscommunicated.”

David Maljkovic

Work from his oeuvre.

“Maljkovic’s art is open and fluid: the narrative structure of the episodes from which it is composed can be manipulated and reordered. At the CAPC, he underscored this ability to reinvent his approach through a careful dialogue with the museum’s architecture, by dividing a wing of the building into distinct thematic areas. In the first he presented the two video episodes of These Days (2005) and Lost Memories from these Days (2005–6), shown on small screens supported on wooden stands designed by the artist; in the second he presented the video Again for Tomorrow (2003–5); and in the third he installed the entire series of ‘Scenes for a New Heritage’ on large-format screens supported by precariously assembled cardboard panels. Set between 2045 and 2060, ‘Scenes for a New Heritage’ centres on the monument designed by the artist Vojin Bakic in memory of the Yugoslav victims of World War II, realized in Petrova Gora in 1981. Over the course of three episodes Maljkovic presents three different moments in time and the varying attitudes groups of young people have towards this historical and architectural icon. While they initially approach the monument with a feeling of wonder and disengagement – apparently unaware of its function or history – a new relationship to the memorial is progressively established, as it becomes a sort of recreational meeting space for new groups of young people.

Maljkovic’s other projects, These Days and Lost Memories from these Days, take as their point of departure another architectural icon from recent Croatian history: the Italian Pavilion at the Zagreb Fair (established by Josip Tito as a rare example of economic exchange between East and West), which was in its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, but which today languishes in a state of semi-abandonment. In these works, the hypnotic nature of the gestures and words of the protagonists creates an effect somewhere between the hallucinatory and the absurd: in one instance a group of young people mechanically repeat, in a trance-like state, what sound like phrases from an elementary course in English; in another, through physical gestures that are decelerated until they become almost sensual, girls describe their relationship to cars: symbols of a future that seems never to arrive. The columns of the iconic Italian Pavilion – a monument to what was once a successful economic and cultural dialogue between the former Yugoslavia and the West – appear to be echoed in a set of polystyrene shapes that lock the tyres of the cars the girls describe to the land: prevented from moving, the static vehicles seem to allude to Croatia, a country whose potential is effectively being hindered until it enters the EU in 2009.

Like the fragments of a thought that slowly piece together, Maljkovic’s works steal up on us gradually, transporting us to a dimension outside of time, where the past and the future are invisible poles between which flickers a uniquely imagined perception of the present. – Luca Cerizza for Frieze

Tanya Johnston

Work from her oeuvre.

“Drawing from symbolism, semiotics, psychology, science and culture, my process of creation attempts to synthesize linear and non-linear thinking. Through my work I explore the realms of reality as illusion, and illusion as reality. I seek to bridge the gap between two hemispheres – both literally and metaphorically – on the mental, emotional and spiritual planes.

My technique is also exploratory, shifting from drawing and painting to mixed-media and digital imaging, often in combination. I access principles of aesthetics and design through the use of mathematics and sacred geometry in order to bring harmony, unity and balance in my work, and in my own experience of life.” – Tanya Johnston via Field Notes.

Radio transmition from two car ferries in Fjordane in Norway, 8 microphones on each ferry brings you live sound, fading in or out, depending on the location of the ferries.  

A radio broadcast over Reykjavik during the Sequences festival 2006. The piece delivers 24hour silence, the only guaranty silence you can get in modern society on FM 106,5.

Live silent FM-transmission from the centre of a see washed lava stone, picket underneath the glacier “Snæfellsjökull” Jules Verne entrance to the centre of earth. The glacier is in the west of Iceland.

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Finnbogi Pétursson

Work from his oeuvre.

“Sonic Austerities – There are occasionally times when the system of national representation in the pavilions at Venice works surprisingly well, and this is one of those times. Finnbogi Pétursson is, for good reason, one of the most acclaimed contemporary Icelandic artists, at a time of considerable vitality for Icelandicartists altogether (a time when the diverse work being produced in Iceland, and by Icelandic artists living abroad, is increasingly attracting broad attention, which historically has by no means been the case.) Since he began exhibiting in the early 1980s, Pétursson has developed an intelligent, eccentric, and poetically lively body of work centering on combinations of sound, sculpture, and architecture-exactly what one finds here, with his architectural sculpture housing the so-called Diabolus tone, and more on this in a minute. The most fundamental thing to know about this artist is that sound is his primary vehicle, however not at all in the sense of music, spoken text, noise, ambient tones, or anything else that he composes or arranges. Rather, Pétursson works with sound pared down to its essence, namely single repetitive tones, at a precise megahertz, which when emitted at different intervals from loudspeakers on the wall, floor, or attached to columns make what Pétursson likes to call “drawings” or “sculptures” in the air: forms consisting not of visible marks but of invisible sound waves. If you could see sound, the way it moves in various waves, the austere yet dazzling shapes that it makes, you would be able to see Pétursson’s sculptures. Of course, this can’t happen, or rather it usually can’t happen. For a wonderful early work, Pétursson literally made sound visible by dangling a loudspeaker over an indoors floor covered with water, like a shallow pool (“Hringur / Circle”, 1991). As the frequency moved from 0 to 200 hertz, vibrating sound from the loudspeaker made small circular ripples on the water, which were in turn

reflected on the wall. Here, you could “see” sound, its amazing and intricate patterns, and throughout Pétursson’s work the invisible, namely sound waves, becomes concrete and super-present, in no matter how subtle a way. Normally, however, as you listen to Pétursson’s sonic drawings or sculptures you don’t see things this way but instead build up an image of what is occurring in your mind.

Still, this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to look at, for Finnbogi Pétursson excels at giving his sound works a distinctly visual cast. Even though his primary medium is sound, Pétursson has, through the years, demonstrated a marked ability to fuse the physical and the ineffable, physical sculpture and pure sound, oftentimes through nothing more than the geometric arrangement of loudspeakers and wires, and his constructions tend to be gorgeous, with an austere yet vivid beauty. Consider, for instance, his piece “Corner” installed in a corner of a room on two adjacent walls. 16 small loudspeakers in total, in 2 facing X-shaped patterns of 8 loudspeakers, form a striking Minimalist-inflected wall sculpture on their own. Each mini-speaker emits sequences of identical tones, namely static white noise culled from an FM receiver. From a distance, all that you hear is a slight tick-tick-ticking that’s easy to miss-this is a particularly humble and unassuming sound piece. Yet when you stand in the corner, really listening, you gradually get the whole effect, which is weird, enticing, mathematical, lovely, and more than a little
hypnotic. Two parallel circular fields slowly assemble, slide toward one another, revolve in unison, and then, in Pétursson’s terms, “explode into an abstract chaos when they go out of phase.” As a viewer/ listener, you really feel that you are standing in the midst of, and physically experiencing, a complex (yet intangible and invisible) sculpture which constantly shifts between order and chaos.

Pétursson comes from a very contemporary, digitized world of electronic sound, electrical engineering, and computer programs, and he has worked extensively on different projects and environments with the noted Icelandic software firm OZ. For all the technical expertise that goes into his work, however, it also has an aura of mystery and psychological transportation, as he channels primal, decidedly non-human things into his work: “pure” sound, “pure” tones, and not sound worked up into any kind of composed or
arranged music. For “Schumann ómurinn / Schumann Resonance”, 1999, a work in dialogue with wall works made of actual lava chips by Ragna Róbertsdóttir, another noted Icelandic artist, vibrating metal panels at either end of the gallery sent out sound waves that mixed in the middle of the room to yield the so-called Schumann resonance-the ultralow frequency that characterizes the space between the earth’s surface and the ionosphere. As you stood in the room, you were listening, quite literally, to the primal hum of the world between earth and sky, technologically duplicated, of course, but at the exact megahertz, and in any event a sound that under normal conditions one would not be able to hear.

Probably there are a lot of sources for Pétursson’s work, and probably one of those sources is Iceland itself. When you go up to the high, volcanic regions, for instance around the great volcanoes Hekla or Katla, you can listen deeply into a silence so supreme that it seems to be unearthly. At the same time, you are aware that beneath you, deep in the earth, there is tremendous sound going on, and that periodically the forces generating it rise up to dramatically rearrange the entire landscape. It’s not that Pétursson is making works about that sound, or works overtly dealing with Icelandic landscape and geology. But at the same time, there is a great deal in his work that suggests a marked openness to the kind of elemental, vast, world-shaping powers that are so prevalent in Iceland, which can also have such a pronounced psychological impact, as anyone who lives there, or who has visited there, can readily attest. Ultimately, there is something very meditative, poetic, and perhaps even spiritual, about Pétursson’s sound works, which is one reason why they are so compelling.

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I’m hardly the person to delve into precisely why the Diabolus tone was censored and banned, or into its role in the history of musical composition, but the name certainly tips one off: it was understood that there was something devilish, diabolical, and disordering about this particular dark tone. In any event, what especially interests Pétursson, in addition to the actual sonic qualities of the tone, is the fact that a mere tone could be so subjected to ecclesiastical and state power, moral posturing, manipulation, and
censorship. And so, via his self-made mixture of old and new technologies, an organ and an electronic loudspeaker, Pétursson has reproduced that oncebanned sound and made it exceptionally prominent. More implicitly, what also factors into Pétursson’s work is an investigation of, and opposition to, other forms of censorship, whatever their ilk, and especially censorship of creative tools or ideas. Of course there is also something hilarious about Pétursson traveling to Italy, the seat of the Catholic Church, to uncensor, as it were, a formerly censored thing. In a way, he is setting the record straight,personally rectifying one of many instances when state or church power proved to be heavy-handed and prohibitive.

In the meantime, this work reveals how the various components of Finnbogi Pétursson’s art all fit together seamlessly. Sound, obviously, is crucial; it’s the main material here. These particular sounds are also a prime example of how Pétursson constructs his invisible drawings or sculptures in space, for if you could see the two tones here as wave patterns, you would see how they travel separately, only to intersect at a couple of points, and those are precisely the points where you hear the Diabolus tone. Equally crucial is the tunnel, as a cross between sculpture and architecture; it effectively serves as a conflation of voyaging and restriction, outside and inside, public and private, plenitude and emptiness. Part pure physics, and part evocative poetics, and always with his blend of the sensual and cerebral, Finnbogi Pétursson’s sonic austerities-of which this piece is a good example-constitute a highly unorthodox, yet highly compelling, kind of sculpture which literally traffics in essential elements: space and time, the motion of sound waves, energy, geometry, frequencies. In this case, Pétursson’s elements also come with profound cultural implications, centering on issues of censorship and freedom.” – Gregory Volk

Alana Celii

Work from her oeuvre.

“A lot of my ideas come about through happenstance. I typically shoot first without thinking too much about my ideas, and edit later. Editing is a large part of my process. I saw Jason Fulford speak a long time ago, and he said that he cut up his contact sheets into mini trading cards. I think that was the most important piece of information I learned throughout college.
I feel that within all my works the themes that tie them together are archiving, memory, beauty, and Americana. To a degree, all of my projects have been a variation on a theme. My thesis focused on a nonlinear narrative that explored my own personal experience with adolescent discovery, truth and memory within photography, and also family myth. I am attracted to kitsch, and finding what is ignored, and making it beautiful. The last project I put on my website, called Family Archive, are images from my 110 camera and other point-and-shoots that I recently unearthed and organized. I have this constant desire to reveal what is secret or personal, and share it.” – Alana Celii via Nyphoto interview

Lieko Shiga

Work from Lilly.

“Her stunningly eerie images from the series Lilly manages to create an unreal sensation of being in viewers. Drawing inspiration from paranormal photographs popular in the early days of photography, Lieko shot these images of residents staying in a block of council flats in East London, where she was pursuing her studies.

From her statement:

“This series shows everybody who lives in Tomlinson Close and it was shot in front of an outside wall in the estate which I covered completely with black cloth. Within the cmaera I melted my emotions together with these instants of these randomly-chosen people’s lives, these various personalities and characters and their gazes back at me. As the subjects were all people who lived in this building, I lost my control over them and so an unpredictable narrative, another “Tomlinson Close” came about of its own accord.”” – via Asian Photography Blog

Niklas Persson

Work from A Few Specific Actions (Free).

“A series of installations explores the dramaturgy of meaning and the modes in which information serves as a way of fixing and containing the world. Leaving everyday objects, carefully composed according to a complex set of binaries and word pairs, leaving us with cryptic messages that are loaded with intentionality, yet stubbornly defying fixed meaning.

Information Wants to be Free is a statement, a provocation and an invitation for discussion taking as its point of departure the abundance of free magazines available in London’s public sphere. In the exhibition, The London Paper, Metro and London Lite are allowed to serve as a basis for a larger exploration of free information; its mode of entering consciousness and becoming a seemingly transparent backdrop to the everyday.

Read by millions of commuters each day, the easily accessible, insistently fragmented and free of charge magazines open up for questions about the kinds of messages allowed in the public sphere and the modes in which they work within this space. The title does in this sense have a dual meaning, beyond referring to ‘free’ as in gratis information it also suggests a level of desire and agency in play in information flows. Beyond being a passive entity to be consumed, information is here treated as something considerably more dynamic and endlessly more difficult to define…” – Niklas Persson

Martijn Hendriks

Work from his oeuvre.

There is a good interview here.

“Martijn Hendriks’s videos, sculptures, and installations often involve seemingly unproductive gestures. Exploring how such unproductive acts like displacements, mistranslation, removals, withholding things, obstructions, overdoing things, repetition, mismatchings, and attempts at impossible or redundant tasks may become productive, a common thread in his work is the possibility of transformation, or how one cultural object or gesture may turn into another. He often uses any materials available, ranging from found images, forms and references culled from art historical sources, to existing objects, texts, film and video footage, Google image searches and viral videos downloaded from the internet.” – Martijn Hendriks