TRANSFER is pleased to present a selection of moving images from women refiguring technology in partnership with Pioneer Works.

Participating Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Faith Holland, Lu Yang, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, Claudia Hart and Snow Yunxue Fu

In recent years, the contours of a new contemporary art movement have begun to emerge, forged in reaction to the ideologies of Silicon Valley, the platforming and globalization of culture, and technologies of power like artificial intelligence, photorealistic computer-generated images, and virtual and augmented reality. These artists simultaneously embrace and subvert technology as their means of interrogation–expressing humanist, non-binary, and decolonized futures.

Curated by Kelani Nichole, the exhibition includes works by Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Faith Holland, Lu Yang, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, Claudia Hart and Snow Yunxue Fu. This program explores identity, the body, and the politics of technology. Virtual space is inhabited with queer bodies, and cultural identity is reclaimed through subversive uses of technology. The boundaries of technology and the body are blurred, as are the lines between author, image, and copy. Possible futures emerge as the layers of simulation that mediate contemporary culture are revealed.

FEATURED ARTWORKS ///

Faith Holland
Visual Orgasms
Animated GIF Series (2013–2015)
Filmic media has put pressure on sex to be visually consumable. Actors perform for a camera and an audience, for maximum visibility rather than pleasure. As a result, pornography is often brightly lit, performed in “unnatural” poses, and, most infamously, ejaculation almost always occurs externally as if to prove that some gratification was attained. Visual Orgasms exaggerates this mandate to ‘make-visible’ by creating excessive moving image collages that depict metaphors for orgasm with no actual depiction of sex.

Snow Yunxue Fu
Karst
Moving Image with Audio (2018)
Karst is multi-level virtual reality visual and sound experience / artwork that creates liminal spaces in between the representational and the theatrical, the limited and the multi-dimensional, and the abstract and the real for people to visit and experience. Karst is an on-going project and a continuation of Fu’s artistic interests in creating virtual reality pieces that explore the idea of the techno sublime, relating to Chinese and Western landscape paintings, as well as the technological culture changing the way humans live in contemporary society.

Meriem Bennani
Fardaous Funjab
Single Channel Video with Audio (2015/2016)
Meriem Bennani uses video, sculpture, and multimedia installations to express a humorous approach of our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Fardaous Funjab is a fictitious reality TV show which follows the eponymous designer of avant-garde hijabs and accessories, re-evaluating preconceived notions about Islamic attire.

Morehshin Allahyari
She Who Sees the Unknown: Huma
Single Channel Video with Audio (2016)
She who Sees the Unknown is an in progress body of work on Digital Colonialism and re-Figuring as a Feminism and activism practice, in which Morehshin Allahyari uses 3D scanners and 3D printers as her tools of investigation. Through poetic and metaphoric narrations She Who Sees The Unknown: Huma explores injustice by connecting it to heat/high temperature, madness, hallucination and the ‘taking over’ of colonized power.

Tabita Rezaire
Premium Connect
Single Channel Video with Audio (2017)
In Premium Connect Rezaire deploys a form of “digital healing activism” that envisions decolonized technologies through which we can “holistically connect to ourselves, to one another, to the earth, and to the multiverse.” The mixture of original footage, found video, and 3D simulation presents a chaotic assault of internet signifiers.

LaTurbo Avedon
ID
Single Channel Video with Audio (2015)
A poetic visualization of the creation of personal metadata, for the identification of a digital self – born from code. In ‘ID’ LaTurbo addresses how social media platforms have continued to move toward the creation of authenticators adding real name policies and hungry terms of service to access to personal information. (2015, Single Channel Video with Audio)

Lorna Mills
Yellowhirlwind
4-channel Animated GIF Installation (2016)
Lorna Mills sources images from Reddit, Google+, Porn Fail, and Russian sites and takes clear delight in “internet filth” but also gives careful attention to mundane imagery we might not normally think twice about. Her four-channel work Yellowhirlwind is characteristic of her GIF-based work. It layers looping animations of found imagery like muscle cars, cyclones, and dismembered bodies until the collective effect turns intangible, anxious, and outrageous.

Eva Papamargariti
Always a Body, Always a Thing
Single Channel Video with Audio (2016)
Papamargariti examines transformation and morphological/ontological fluidity through a series of bizarre incidents – actual or imagined – whose common thread is the ingestion and embodiment of plastic by living beings (fish, frogs) that end up mutating, as well as the appearance of a host of amorphous masses in natural settings (meadows, lakes). In ‘Always a Body, Always a Thing’ Papamargariti introduces us to toxic progenies of the living world and to the queer futures they portend.

Claudia Hart
Alice Unchained
Single Channel Video with Audio (2017)
For Alice Unchained, Claudia Hart directed and motion-captured professional wrestler Isaias Velazquez and choreographer Kristina Isabelle, mixing their data together to create a singular, ‘cyborg’ choreography. The work mashes 3D animation, motion-captured live performance, and music performed by live and virtual musicians whose sound is analyzed in real-time and remixed in the bodies of sculptural avatars. It feeds-back the virtual and the live, blending them together in a liminal, uncanny mix.

Lu Yang
Electromagnetic Brainology
5-Channel Video with Audio (2017)
In Buddhism, the four great elements are fire, earth, water, and air. Lu Yang reimagines the elements as superhero gods, each corresponding to a different part of the human central nervous system. Together the gods combat the troubles of humanity, alleviating the pressures of life through a host of specialized weaponry. Without even one of the gods, humanity is lost.

PRESS CONTACT ## Kelani Nichole: director@transfergallery.com