Looks
22 April–21 June 2015
Institute of Contemporary Arts
Lower & Upper Galleries
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH
Looks is a group exhibition that includes artists Juliette Bonneviot, Andrea Crespo, Morag Keil, Wu Tsang and Stewart Uoo. Through a wide range of media, from film installations and painting, to sculpture and photography, this exhibition explores the ways in which mass digital culture informs how identity is constructed, performed and challenged. Using methods that are playful and responsive to new technologies, many artists today engage with notions of a post-human world, particularly in relation to gender and sexuality.
Today, the body and the expression of its identity are no longer automatically linked, and the physical body itself is noticeably absent. Objects, words and digital images are the now main tools of representation as the lines between identity and brand become increasingly blurred within late capitalist society. Adopting the position of the “prosumer,” at once a spectator and an individual creator of culture, it is the online self that is required to be ever present, ever responsive, ever communicated and ever performed.
Supported by the Looks Exhibition Supporters Group including Project Native Informant, London and Fluxus.
To coincide with the exhibition, there will be an associated programme of talks, performance events and film screenings:
Artist’s talk: Wu Tsang
Thursday 23 April, 6:30pm
Educators’ gallery tour
Wednesday 22 April, 5pm
Led by ICA Head of Programme Katharine Stout
Artists’ Film Club: Oliver Laric + Q&A
Wednesday 22 April, 6:30pm
Oliver Laric attempts to overhaul the preconceived formulas of video and sculpture, blurring the space between the original art forms and his reimaginings. This screening will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.
Artists’ Film Club: Breaking Joints
Wednesday 13 May, 6:45pm
Wednesday 10 June, 6:45pm
Two-part group screening bringing together a series of works that deal with 2D and 3D animation. Surreal narratives are played out by a new generation of emerging artists.
ICA Cinematheque: Eye on I
5 May–16 June
This season of screenings explore the production and performance of identity within a modern era dominated by mass digital culture, with a particular emphasis upon gender and sexuality.
Gallery tour
Thursday 7 May, 6.30pm
Led by artist Chloe Cooper
Symposia: (Dis) identifications
Wednesday 27 May, 11:15am–5pm
This one-day event is devoted to a collective exploration of the role of gender and sexual identifications in contemporary art practices. Identification and dis-identification are approached as evolving intersectional concepts and embodied practices, foregrounding the indivisibility of body and mind, the material and the virtual.
Looks Live
Friday 19 June, 6:30pm
An evening of performances by UK and international writers, poets and artists, that explores the revived interest in language in contemporary culture and its relationship to identity in a post-digital era.
Artists’ Film Club: WILDNESS
Saturday 20 June, 1pm
WILDNESS, Wu Tsang’s feature-length documentary, is a portrait of the Silver Platter, a historic bar in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles that has been home for Latin/LGBT immigrant communities since 1963.
Also at the ICA:
Fear of Missing Out
29–31 May
Chaired by Berlin artist and theorist Hito Steyerl, this three-day event brings together leading international theorists, academics, social thinkers and artists to discuss postdigital anxieties and the social condition.
From her wooden sleep…Ydessa Hendeles
25 March–17 May
ICA Theatre
FB55
24 March–17 May
Fox Reading Room
