June 30–October 3, 2021
This summer the New Museum is proud to present a series of solo exhibitions by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Wong Ping, and Ed Atkins, along with a collaborative exhibition by artists Maryam Hoseini, Rindon Johnson, and Jordan Strafer.
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Twisted
For over 50 years, Lynn Hershman Leeson (b. 1941, Cleveland, OH) has created an innovative and prescient body of work that mines the intersections between technology and the self. Known for her groundbreaking contributions to media art, Hershman Leeson has consistently worked with the latest technologies, from artificial intelligence to DNA programming, often anticipating their impact on society. The exhibition brings together a selection of Hershman Leeson’s wide-ranging work in drawing, sculpture, video, and photography, along with interactive and net-based works, focusing on themes of transmutation, identity construction, and the cyborg self. The presentation includes over 60 early drawings and wax-cast sculptures from the 1960s; her well-known durational performance project Roberta Breitmore (1972–79); selections from her series Water Women (1976–present), Phantom Limb (1985–88), and Cyborg (1996–2006), among others; as well as video works from the 1970s through the present. The exhibition also features Hershman Leeson’s recent large-scale project, The Infinity Engine (2014–present), and a new commission, Twisted Gravity (2020–2021), produced in collaboration with the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, that incorporates new technologies to purify toxicities in water. Twisted is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Karen Archey, Martine Syms, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Margot Norton.
Wong Ping: Your Silent Neighbor
Over the past ten years, Wong Ping (b. 1984, Hong Kong) has developed a highly personal, self-taught style of animation to craft tales of individual desire, societal pressure, and political upheaval. Before his colorful and sometimes disturbing stories received mainstream attention from the art world, the artist worked in commercial animation. Although his videos may at first recall children’s cartoons, Wong’s work emerges from his own written stories and journals, revealing the aspirations and anxieties of everyday residents of Hong Kong through surreal narratives and a bizarre cast of anthropomorphic characters. Filling the Museum’s Third Floor galleries, this exhibition brings together a selection of new and recent work from across his experimental oeuvre, including Jungle of Desire (2015), a video that tells the story of a homemaker turned sex worker, her policeman client, and her voyeuristic husband; Who’s the Daddy?, a tale of love and parenthood in the digital age; and Wong Ping’s Fables 2 (2019), the second of Wong’s takes on traditional fairy tales in which a variety of creatures learn valuable lessons about modern life. The presentation includes the debut of a new video commissioned for the exhibition. The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, with Francesca Altamura, former Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, the artist’s first, with contributions by Carrion-Murayari; Tobias Berger of Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Hong Kong; and by artist David Horvitz.
Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love’s Work
Over the past decade, Ed Atkins (b. 1982, Oxford, United Kingdom) has created a complex body of work that considers the relationship between the corporeal and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny, through high-definition computer-generated (CG) animations, theatrical environments, elliptical writings, and sound montages. At the New Museum, Atkins premieres a new project that focuses on the ways bodies and technologies are intertwined, particularly in the field of digital communication and telepresence. As always in Atkins’s work, technology is analyzed as a theoretical and even allegorical interrogation of itself. Installed in the Museum’s Fourth Floor gallery, the exhibition debuts a new body of work made with technologies that profess to “capture” life. The central piece of the exhibition is a CG animation recorded using motion- and facial-capture technologies, which documents an interview between the artist and his mother—shot during the isolated months of lockdown that have defined the Covid-19 pandemic. Weaving together a variety of references—ranging from British playwright Dennis Potter’s last televised interview to English philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work, along with autobiographical notations and confessional digressions—the exhibition composes what the artist describes as an “essay about distance.” The exhibition reflects on the ways in which technologies designed to facilitate connection and representation paradoxically expose loss and underscore separation.
Get Life/Love’s Work is the culmination of a partnership between the New Museum and Nokia Bell Labs to relaunch the legendary Experiments in Art and Technology program, aimed at fostering meaningful exchange between the fields of art and technology. Get Life/Love’s Work is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Atkins, Erika Balsom, Gioni, Mark Leckey, Julie Martin, and Madeline Weisburg.
This End the Sun
A collaborative exhibition by artists Maryam Hoseini (b. 1988, Tehran, Iran), Rindon Johnson (b. 1990, San Francisco, CA, United States), and Jordan Strafer (b. 1990, Miami, FL, United States), This End the Sun is on view in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery. Inspired by the view through the Lobby Gallery skylights, the artists have designed a computer program that performs a prediction, constructing an ongoing speculative simulation of the sky overhead as it shifts between day and night. As with the title of the exhibition, the artists consider ideas of perspective in representation; probing the desire to control, frame, and capture. In addition to the projection, the exhibition includes new paintings by Hoseini, stone sculptures by Johnson, and a video by Strafer, all of which were created specifically for this presentation. This exhibition is curated by Margot Norton, Allen and Lola Goldring Curator.
