Tishan Hsu, Charlie Prodger and Agency of Singular Investigations

Tishan Hsu: recent work 2023
Titled recent work 2023, the American artist Tishan Hsu’s exhibition at the Secession consists entirely of new works. After his first major retrospective, which opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2020 and then traveled to the SculptureCenter in New York, where Hsu lives, the artist’s work was prominently featured in the central exhibition The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. For last year’s Carnegie International, he conceived several large-scale sculptures; the sculptures he now presents at the Secession elaborate on the ideas they articulate. Taken together, these three major exhibitions in recent years threw Hsu’s creative evolution over the past four decades into relief, illustrating both his changing choices of techniques and materials and his methodological constancy and persistent pursuit of key concerns.

Tishan Hsu’s preoccupation with the body in a world of technology dates back to the 1980s. How bodies and consciousness change in the interaction with digital technology is a question he has insistently probed. His insights into the interpenetration of human and technology have proven visionary; science fiction anticipated its culmination in the hybrid existence of the cyborg, but it left few traces in the art of the 1980s. Hsu, who studied architecture at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, moved to New York in the early 1980s and started exhibiting his art. His training at MIT with its culture of innovation and research into the technologies of the future was formative for him and he still adopts novel technologies and integrates them into his creative practice. Meanwhile, he retains classical “handmade” techniques and processes and cherishes the deliberate slowness of artistic production. Hsu’s works are always both—manufactured in a traditional practice and involving cutting-edge processes.

Tishan Hsu was born in Boston in 1951 and lives and works in New York City.

The exhibition was produced in cooperation with the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva, where the artist’s largest retrospective outside the U.S. to date is scheduled to open in March 2024.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.
Curated by Bettina Spörr.

Charlie Prodger: The Offering Formula
Charlie Prodger (b.1974) is a Scottish artist working with moving image, photography, sculpture and drawing. She won the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She is currently a 2023–24 Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Broadly, Prodger’s work orbits histories - from the weight of deep geological time to more contingent forms of narrative such as anecdote and oral history. Through the prism of queer subjectivity, her work explores intertwined relations between the body, landscape, language, technology and time.

The Offering Formula includes two rooms of photographs, sculptural wall-based works, and a new series of meticulously rendered drawings. These still lives continue Prodger’s interest in geology in relation to time and identity, taxonomy, versions, mises-en-abymes, and the erotics of fragmentation. Having worked with reproductive technologies for over thirty years, Prodger has inherently moved through many discontinued formats, and the migration of data from one format to another has inherently become part of her formal language. She is fascinated by processes of conservation and preservation, whereby materials and time, permanence and entropy, are held in perpetual balance.

In the third room, Prodger exhibits in its entirety for the first time her film trilogy Stoneymollan Trail (2015), BRIDGIT (2016), and SaF05 (2019), in which she seeks to counter linear history and its imperative of progress by producing a matrix of contingent, transhistorical queer relations. This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Secession is publishing a book in which London-based professor of literature and visual culture Sarah Hayden offers a detailed analysis of the significance of the voice in Prodger’s videos.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.

Agency of Singular Investigations: On New Thinking and Other Forgotten Dreams
The artist duo Agency of Singular Investigations (ASI) is showing their new installation On New Thinking and Other Forgotten Dreams in the Grafisches Kabinett at the Secession. Anna Titova and Stanislav Shuripa founded ASI in 2014 to take a stand on the dramatic changes in Russia’s political reality and cultural atmosphere and to respond to the advent of the postfactual age by thinking about alternative ways of harnessing images and means of communication for the construction of identities and worldviews.

The installation is the first part of their wide-ranging research project The Park of Mind Revolutions, which investigates the history of subjectivity and the forms and functions of Russia’s self-image in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Organized as a dialogue between the worker Grigoriy Zamzin and a pickle about the meaning of Russia’s most recent history, the installation comprises four sculptures, a blue carpet and, a sprawling wall diagram executed like a child’s scrawl, visualizing a history of decline and sclerosis. Organized by decades, the diagram begins with the effort in the 1980s to build a more open and diverse world and concludes with the disaster of the 2020s and the suppression of civic protest in Russia. Taking inspiration from the interwar literature of magical realism, the artists employ carefully selected fantastic elements, irrational events, and metaphors to frame a critical perspective on the complexity of their country’s historical evolution. Playing with hybrid dimensions of reality and collisions between historical forces, they expose the energies that shape the psychological, technological, and social system.

Anna Titova (b. 1984) and Stanislav Shuripa (b. 1971) currently live and work in Paris.

Programmed by the Board of the Secession.
Curated by Annette Südbeck.

Publications
The exhibitions are accompanied by publications. The digital publications are available for free here.

Opening program
Opening: Thursday, November 30, 2023, 7pm
Exhibition talk: Tishan Hsu in conversation with Patrizia Dander, an event by the Friends of the Secession, Thursday, November 30, 2023, 6pm

Press contact
presse@secession.at
Press preview: Thursday, November 30, 2023, 10am
Press materials: secession.at/presse