New Technology & The Post-Human
Marit Silsand (b.1980, NO) is a visual artist living and working in Oslo. She works with analogue photography, video and site-specific installations. In 2010 Silsand graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where her studies included an exchange program to San Francisco Art Institute in 2008. From 2003-04 she studied at Fatamorgana–The Danish School of Art Photography in Copenhagen. Silsand is a member of Bjørka, a collective atelier space for lens based artists in Oslo.
Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer, whose films and essays are interested in private and political narratives of the digital. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and University of Cambridge, and is a staff contributor to Frieze Magazine. Recent exhibitions include Tenderflix ‘Futures' at ICA, London and Would you like help? at EMBASSY Gallery, Edinburgh.
Video: Gary Zhexi Zhang, lacoste1, 2015
David Blandy & Larry Achiampong led PRAKSIS's inaugural residency, "New Technology And The Post-Human," in March - April, 2016. Through their work, Blandy and Achiampong examine ideas of communal and personal heritage, using performance to investigate cultural hierarchies and the “fiction of the self”.
Blandy and Achiampong have exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally, both individually and as a duo, at venues including Tate, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; and MOMA PS1, New York. Their 2014-15 hip-hop-inspired collaboration Biters was funded by the Arts Council of England and is “unique, in that it unifies both appropriation as a methodology and “biting” [the stealing of taggers’ or hip-hop artists’ personal styles] as an existential state”, critic Morgan Quaintance has written. “Biters…is a project about attraction and repulsion, and in hip-hop Achiampong and Blandy have recognised a musical genre pulsating with all the contradictory energies of hierarchical value systems, based on race, privilege and subjection”.
Video: David Blandy and Larry Achiampong, Finding Fanon 2, 2015
Commissioned by Brighton Digital Festival 2015, supported by Arts Council England. Finding Fanon 2 is made using the Grand Theft Auto 5 in-game video editor. The Finding Fanon series is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a politically radical humanist whose practice dealt with the psychopathology of colonisation and the social and cultural consequences of decolonisation.
Eli Maria Lundgaard (b.1989 in Trondheim, Norway) finished a BFA at Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 2015. She will start on a MFA at Malmö Art Academy in 2016.
She works with video, drawing, collages and sculpture.
Her art is about comprehension. She explores different concepts of the psyche, for instance anxiety or hypochondria. She also questions the subject and its surroundings: how body and environment are shaped by influences, direct intervention, or evolution and natural changes.
The relationship between the natural and the artificial is interesting. Both science and art are curious and concerned the absence of information. We are looking for systems and definitions to put things in. Everything around us should be categorized and organized. These categories and systems come from what we are learned to look for. What cannot be described "physically", but only sensed, leads to speculation and fantasy. What do we do when explanations are missing?
What we cannot see or explain turn into myths, monsters and magic. Fiction and dreams blends with reality and makes a setting we can live within and think.
Maren Dagny Juell is an Oslo based artist working with moving image and installation. Her subjects are alienated, filled with doubt and with a yearning for control and personal development. Maren is interested in the borders of subjectivity and individual autonomy. This is approached with narrative text often collected from online forums and tutorials. The works seeks to embody an investigation into the reality of appearances, surfaces and definition of visual space aided by technology.
Maren studied in London and has an MA from Chelsea College of Art. Recently exhibitions has been at Stavanger Art Museum and Papay Gyro Nights (Orkney and Hong Kong) amongst others. She won an award for video at BEERS contemporary (London) in 2013 and was included in Lights On Norwegian Contemporary Art at the Astrup Fearnely Museum in Oslo in 2008.
Video: Maren Dagny Juell, Tutorial#6: It’s our ability to create stylish meals that separates us from the animals (Bear Grylls)
Tutorial#6 refers to instructional videos by survivalists. Three men meet and have a conversation made up by fragmented quotations collected from instructional tutorial videos and on-line forums about survival. During the meeting, they all make a flower out of gaffer tape, zip-ties and para-cord.
The work was initially made for an exhibition related to the tapestry weaver Frida Hansen (1855-1931) and also includes sculptures. Juell was interested in the gender roles assigned to textile craft and the purpose of these activities (craft clubs- craft as therapy). Her project is a fictional account of themale dominated culture of survivalist preparing for the apocalypse.
Self-styled “Famous New Media Artist” Jeremy Bailey’s inventive and endearingly self-deflating performance practice collides the vulnerabilites and embarrassments of physical embodiment with the tricks of internet marketing and digital imaging’s sleek pictographics.
His work has featured in an international roster of venues and festivals, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Liverpool; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Museums Quartier, Vienna; and the New Museum, New York. Via his project The You Museum (2015-ongoing), Bailey’s displays – individually tailored to suit the viewer’s personal tastes – can be accessed globally online: see here.
Video: Jeremy Bailey, The Future of Television, 2012.
Software demo created for Random Acts: Artist Interventions into Broadcast 26 October 2012Commissioned by Omar Kholeif for FACT, Liverpool and Liverpool Biennial in partnership with Channel 4 and Arts Council England Thanks to Kyle McDonald for developing Face OSC
Martina Petrelli is an artist, designer and curator: Italian by blood, Canadian by birth, British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Norwegian, Palestinian, Swiss and Tunisian because of her life journey. Her higher education includes a MA degree from the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam, a BA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Lyon, an international Baccaleureate of philosophy, language and literature, and the participation to the study course Psychology of Language at the Universitetet i Tromsø.
She has exhibited and worked for several cultural platforms internationally and across Europe, and is now engaged at Fotogalleriet in Oslo as Project Coordinator for the upcoming anniversary exhibitions, publications and public archives. Her artistic practice approaches art and design as revelatory of reasons and of the absurd, as a study and reutilisation of images and structures that script given realities, juxtaposing ways of reading and of seeing.
Images: Ongoing Artistic Research
