K Allado-McDowell: The Known Lost
May 7–September 7, 2025
Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King: De Anima
SI is pleased to present De Anima, an exhibition that brings together, for the first time, the work of Louise Bonnet and Elizabeth King. Bonnet’s paintings often depict bodies suspended between grotesque physicality with symbolic foreboding, and simultaneous subjugation by external forces. King’s sculptures and animations are made in search of the most lifelike shapes and movements, while her research into Renaissance automata posits them as the precursors to today’s mimetic intelligence technologies. While passing as all-too-human, these lack true life force, though not influence. The result of a year-long dialogue between the artists, initiated on the occasion of the exhibition, De Anima pushes against the boundaries between life and nonlife, vitality and passivity, and substance and gesture, in relation to art, technology, and gender.
Across generational and mediatic differences, Bonnet and King’s works share a cinematic sense of temporality, evoking both past and future through gesture and pose to convey the potential for motion and emotion. Their interrogation of delineations between agency and passivity relates to gendered and other social hierarchies, as explored in Iris Marion Young’s essay, Throwing Like a Girl (1980). In it, the philosopher argues that perceived limitations on feminine mobility are not rooted in physiology but in societal and psychological conditioning. The political subjugation and suspension of othered bodies between life and death, extensions of biopower, and advancements in biotechnology and artificial intelligence today throw life’s definitions and valuations into high relief. Through the original pairing of Bonnet and King’s work, De Anima examines life and its semblance at this moment of heightened pressure on epistemic, existential, and technological questions of animacy.
Louise Bonnet (b. 1970, Geneva) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MAMCO, Geneva; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; and Long Museum, Shanghai, among numerous others. Her work has been subject of a solo exhibition at the Hollyhock House, and was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams; as well as in group exhibitions at The Warehouse, Dallas; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, among others.
Elizabeth King (b. 1950, Ann Arbor) lives and works in Richmond. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among others. Awards for her work include Anonymous Was a Woman, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University). She was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Design in November 2017. She is the co-author (with W. David Todd) of Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend (Getty Publications, 2023). Her work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at MASS MoCA, among others; and group exhibitions at Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein; Flag Art Foundation, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
De Anima is curated by Stefanie Hessler, Director.
The exhibition is presented with the support of Gagosian. Watchmaking Art Partner: Jaquet Droz.
K Allado-McDowell: The Known Lost
SI is pleased to present The Known Lost, the first exhibition of the work of writer, artist, and musician K Allado-McDowell. Featuring a stage set composed of theatrical backdrops, a platform, and a microphone, the exhibition serves as a rehearsal and performance space for Act I of Allado-McDowell’s opera of the same name. The gallery’s scenography depicts a proposed monument, which will be made to recognize and honor all species that have ever lived and gone extinct on Earth.
Presented in the lower-level gallery, the monument is rendered in a graphic style, reminiscent of early 20th century European Spiritualist painting, across seven cloth backdrops. In the center, a platform hosts a set of books containing a list of the scientific names of the 180,285 known extinct species from all kingdoms, compiled by Allado-McDowell from paleobiology databases. This list functions as both the libretto of the opera and the names to be engraved into the monument. While the list acknowledges and celebrates life, it also frames life as ephemeral. Visitors are invited to read or sing the species’ names over an original score by composer Derrick Skye. In doing so, they collectively rehearse and perform the first act of the opera, realizing the monument in the collective imagination—a foundational step towards its eventual construction.
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, artist, and musician. They have authored several books with GPT-3, co-edited and contributed to multiple anthologies, and regularly publish essays on art, AI and ecology. They created the neuro-opera Song of the Ambassadors, and record and release music under the name Qenric. They established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google in 2015. Allado-McDowell has spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, New Museum, Tate, Serpentine Gallery, HKW, Moderna Museet, Christie’s, MacArthur Foundation, MfN Berlin, Ars Electronica, Sónar, and many other venues, and has taught at SCI-Arc, Strelka, and IAAC.
The Known Lost is made possible in part through the support of Molly Gochman.
This exhibition is curated by Alison Coplan, Chief Curator.
do you read me?!
SI is pleased to announce its partnership with do you read me?!, the renowned Berlin-based independent bookstore, known for its unique perspective on contemporary print and publishing. Opening on May 8, 2025, in SI’s lobby, this will be the first-ever brick and mortar location of do you read me?! in the US.
