anti-utopias
"anti-utopias" is a thematic and critical international contemporary art platform founded in 2011. The platform publishes artistic works regardless of the artists’ medium of expression (photography, video, installation art, painting, etc.)
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World War Something, Don McCullin
Tide
Latest music video for a track by Black Cracker was put together by pussykrevv using multiple 3D scans and...
New work in progress, from the ongoing series Prodromes
Three new towns close to Rome, founded by the Fascist regime in the 1930s: Littorio, Sabaudia and Pontinia.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) has recently opened Tatsuo Miyajima‘s exhibition Connect with Everything as part of the Sydney International Art Series 2016–17. One of Japan’s leading contemporary artists, Tatsuo Miyajima is known for his immersive and technologically driven sculptures and installations. Curated by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent, this is the artist’s first retrospective exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere and is exclusive to Sydney. Tatsuo Miyajima represented Japan at the 1999 Venice Biennale with the vast installation Mega Death. A highlight of this survey, Mega Death is a room-scale installation of brilliant, blinking blue LEDs, each representative of human life or energy. A silent, twinkling memorial to death during the Second World War recalling Hiroshima and Auschwitz, the lights are programmed to switch off at intervals, plunging viewers into complete darkness momentarily, before lighting up and counting once more. More images, interview excerpts, video and complete information.
Susan Hiller is an influential pioneer of multimedia installation art recognized for her early adoption of video as an artistic medium and for her ability to transform conventional gallery spaces into haunting, immersive environments. Hiller combines the archival tendencies of conceptual art with an emphasis on psychologically charged subjects, from war memorials to paranormal phenomena. Commissioned by Pérez Art Museum Miami and making its debut in this exhibition, Hiller’s video Lost and Found features an audio collage of voices speaking in 23 different languages, including Aramaic, Comanche, Livonian and other extinct or endangered idioms. Many of the anecdotes, songs, arguments, memories, and conversations that the voices relay revolve around the theme of language itself. Translations of these utterances appear in the form of subtitles, which provide an entry point into the narrators’ diverse cultural circumstances. More information
Taking inspiration in the fact that algae were the first life on earth, creating the oxygen that has since made other life forms possible, Danish artist Astrid Myntekær uses algae to represent both death and rebirth. Today, as the world metropolises are slowly suffocating by pollution and lack of oxygen, the algae are part of the threat and simultaneously they are a new technology for the purification of air and water, a contribution to experimental energy production in algae reactors as well as one of the health food industry popular supplements. In Mana Stash, algae form a self-generating ecosystem unfolding as an environment of life forms beyond the human scale. More information
the real-fake.org.2.0 is an updated and expanded version of the real-fake.org, an exhibition organized by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart. 2.0 includes the work of 51 post-digital media artists curated by Rachel Clarke and Claudia Hart now joined by Patrick Reynolds. The original exhibition premiered at Cal State Sacramento University Gallery in 2011 and was accompanied by a website that defined a new and unusual medium at that time, even for the digital arts. The exhibition toured the US and showed the work of 20 artists that used an array of simulation technologies in the context of contemporary art, such as artificial “xyz” space, the non-referenced, non-indexical synthetic image/object, or the specific qualities of the virtual camera that records it.
Pipilotti Rist, Absolutions, 1988 (still). Single-channel video © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.
The New Museum presents the first New York survey of the work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b.1962). Over the past thirty years, Rist has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her mesmerizing works envelop viewers in sensual, vibrantly colored kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological sublime. Referring to her art as a “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” Rist maintains a deep sense of curiosity that pervades her explorations of physical and psychological experiences. Her works bring viewers into unexpected, all-consuming encounters with the textures, forms, and functions of the living universe around us. More information
Pipilotti Rist, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000 (still). Single-channel video installation, silent, color; 9 min. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.
The New Museum presents the first New York survey of the work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b.1962). Over the past thirty years, Rist has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her mesmerizing works envelop viewers in sensual, vibrantly colored kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological sublime. Referring to her art as a “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” Rist maintains a deep sense of curiosity that pervades her explorations of physical and psychological experiences. Her works bring viewers into unexpected, all-consuming encounters with the textures, forms, and functions of the living universe around us. More information
Thomas Schütte, United Enemies, 2011. Installation view of Thomas Schütte: United Enemies at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2016-2017. Photo: Åsa Lundén / Moderna Museet © Thomas Schütte Bildupphovsrätt 2016.
One of the most seminal artists of his generation, known mainly for his sculptures, Thomas Schütte’s recently opened exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm features installations, architectural models, drawings, prints and gigantic sculptures in a major exhibition titled United Enemies. Taking the artist’s sculptural works from the past two decades as a starting point, the exhibition looks at Schütte’s exploration around shits of scale, juxtaposing the intimate and personal with the monumental. A colossal steel figure outside the museum entrance, Vater Staat (2010), observes visitors as they arrive, while the key work in the exhibition – the monumental bronze sculptures United Enemies (2011) – originate in his small, sketchy figures with heads of modelling clay made nearly twenty years earlier. More information
Photograph: Trine Søndergaard. Part of the Summer in the City 2016 yearly group exhibition organized by Martin Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen.
We have just launched a crowdfunding campaign to publish revolving futures, a 430 pages book that explores the intersections of contemporary art, technology, science, and culture. Featuring the works of 220 international artists and 30 curators and theoreticians from around the world who discuss about art, architecture, politics, media and net art, digital art, issues of identity and cultural (mis)representation, the book needs your support to come to life.
Learn more details about the book and support our crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo
Martin Sampedro, Latente (2015). Images courtesy the artist. Used here by kind permission. All rights reserved.
Video and full documentation: Martin Sampedro - Latente
An exploration into the possibilities of what the artist calls “New Photography,” Latente is a post-photographic project inviting viewers to discover the latency of images comprised within the series of Alter-portraits. Sampedro’s “New Photography” incorporates latent lights and life forms, hallucinations and virtual beings, to question the nature of photography today in its relation to new forms of creating images in the digital era. Read more
Norimichi Hirakawa - The Indivisible (Prototype No. 1), as installed at TodaysArt Japan, September 2015. Images courtesy of Norimichi Hirakawa. Used here by kind permission from the artist. All rights reserved.
Video documentation and information: https://anti-utopias.com/art/norimichi-hirakawa-indivisible/
Hirakawa is interested in exploring the physical manifestation of information where data defies comprehension. He makes visible the code of data flows and allows one to see the abstract figuration of computing processes as they unfold before our eyes. Read more
Monokini 2.0. Image courtesy Monokini 2.0. Used here by kind permission from the artists. All rights reserved.
Monokini 2.0 Catwalk Show: Challenging Stigma and Social Exclusion
Monokini 2.0 is an art project initiated by Finnish artists Katriina Haikala and Vilma Metteri that re-examines popular culture and takes a stand on Western commercial culture’s narrow idea of women’s ideal appearance. The two artists have asked a group of Finnish designers to design a swimwear collection for women who have gone through breast cancer. While swimwear is conventionally designed for women who haven’t had a mastectomy, many women who have had one breast removed due to the breast cancer don’t wish to have breast reconstruction operation and would like to continue their lives with one or no breasts at all. “We think that the current focus on breast reconstruction after mastectomy as the only way to a full life, is a breast-fixated way of seeing what a woman is. We want to incite a positive self-image of breast-operated women by showing that you can be whole, beautiful and sexy even with just one breast or with no breasts at all. Our other aim is to dig into the restrictive social taboo on what is considered appropriate – by exposing something that is not there. Seeing an exposed breast is considered nakedness, but why is exposing no breast also considered nakedness?”
Read full material together with interview excerpts here
The project strives to expand the idea of what is considered to be beautiful in the female body by emphasising that beauty lies in ones confidence and community’s acceptance rather than constructed ideals of a “perfect body.”
Monokini 2.0. Image courtesy Monokini 2.0. Used here by kind permission from the artists. All rights reserved.
Monokini 2.0 Catwalk Show: Challenging Stigma and Social Exclusion
Monokini 2.0 is an art project initiated by Finnish artists Katriina Haikala and Vilma Metteri that re-examines popular culture and takes a stand on Western commercial culture’s narrow idea of women’s ideal appearance. The two artists have asked a group of Finnish designers to design a swimwear collection for women who have gone through breast cancer. While swimwear is conventionally designed for women who haven’t had a mastectomy, many women who have had one breast removed due to the breast cancer don’t wish to have breast reconstruction operation and would like to continue their lives with one or no breasts at all. “We think that the current focus on breast reconstruction after mastectomy as the only way to a full life, is a breast-fixated way of seeing what a woman is. We want to incite a positive self-image of breast-operated women by showing that you can be whole, beautiful and sexy even with just one breast or with no breasts at all. Our other aim is to dig into the restrictive social taboo on what is considered appropriate – by exposing something that is not there. Seeing an exposed breast is considered nakedness, but why is exposing no breast also considered nakedness?”
Read full material together with interview excerpts here
The project strives to expand the idea of what is considered to be beautiful in the female body by emphasising that beauty lies in ones confidence and community’s acceptance rather than constructed ideals of a “perfect body.”
Cooper & Gorfer, The Girl Who Never Laughs Or Smiles, “My Quiet of Gold: SEEK Volume 02 / Kyrgyzstan.” Image © Cooper & Gorfer. Used here by kind permission. All rights reserved.
A review of Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer’s photographs shows the artists’ weaving of myths, storytelling, anthropological perspectives and journal notes to create visual stories about remote places and people in Iceland and Kyrgyzstan.
Visual Storytelling in the Photographs of Cooper & Gorfer (book review)
Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer’s work gives voice, literary and imagistic, to people out of reach, to people who are not usually taken into account or who are marginalised in different ways. What’s most important, the images do not reduce people to cut-clear identities or stereotypes. Instead, they stir tension and create a sense of uncertainty towards what is perceived through images, their material correlations and our articulation of what we perceive through texts.
A review of Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer’s photographs shows the artists’ weaving of myths, storytelling, anthropological perspectives and journal notes to create visual stories about remote places and people in Iceland and Kyrgyzstan.
Visual Storytelling in the Photographs of Cooper & Gorfer (book review)
Sarah Cooper and Nina Gorfer’s work gives voice, literary and imagistic, to people out of reach, to people who are not usually taken into account or who are marginalised in different ways. What’s most important, the images do not reduce people to cut-clear identities or stereotypes. Instead, they stir tension and create a sense of uncertainty towards what is perceived through images, their material correlations and our articulation of what we perceive through texts.