New Museum Triennial

Surround Audience

25 February – 24 May 2015

Curators: Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin

About Surround Audience

We are surrounded by a culture replete with impressions of life, be they visual, written, or construed through data. We move through streams of chatter, swipe past pictures of other people’s lives, and frame our own experiences as, all the while, our digital trails are subtly captured, tracked, and stored. This is a culture in which the radical multimedia environments envisioned by pioneering artists like Nam June Paik and Stan VanDerBeek are being lived out every day, albeit with much more complexity and compromise. With these transformations in mind, “Surround Audience” explores how artists are currently depicting subjectivity, unpacking complex systems of power, and claiming sites of artistic agency.

While issues around social media provide a point of departure for the exhibition, it is not the platforms themselves that are the exhibition’s primary focus, but rather the ways their associated effects intersect with life. Among the many narratives and ideas emerging from the works, there are three recurring lines of inquiry: First, how representations of the body and persona have evolved in an image-laden culture in which surveillance is widely dispersed and editorializing one’s life in public is the norm; second, if it might be possible to opt out of or reframe the pressures of increasingly corporatized and invasive spaces; and third, how artists are striving to embed their works in the world around them through incursions into media and activism.

The exhibition encompasses a variety of artistic practices, including sound, dance, comedy, poetry, installation, sculpture, painting, video, and one online talk show. If there is any aesthetic link between these diverse works it is in their energetic mutability of form. Together, these works speak to a newfound elasticity in our understanding of what mediums constitute contemporary art. Here, paintings evolve out of 3-D models, digital images erupt into sculpture, and sound becomes action. This is a group of works that attests to how form is continuously converted across word, image, and medium.

“Surround Audience” makes spaces for differing positions among a group of early-career artists. Many of the works in the Triennial have been commissioned specifically for the show. In the two years leading up to the exhibition, the New Museum has hosted research and production residences for both international and local artists: niv Acosta, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Juliana Huxtable, Geumhyung Jeong, Eduardo Navarro, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, and Luke Willis Thompson. These residencies took different forms: Some consisted of research supported by the New Museum’s curatorial team, while others took place on-site at the studio spaces in the Museum’s adjacent building at 231 Bowery and in the New Museum Theater, which was used as a rehearsal space.

In addition to works featured in the galleries, the curators selected artists to mobilize sites outside of the Museum, including the means of dispersing information about the exhibition itself. Such projects include the Triennial ad campaign Extended Release (2015), which was conceived and designed by New York artist collective K-HOLE and serves as the group’s contribution to the exhibition. Distant Feel (2015)—a new symbol for empathy designed by Antoine Catala, intended as an “update to the peace sign”—was co-commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art and will be made available online as a GIF as well as presented within the show as a sculpture. Finally, episodes of Ovation’s “Touching the Art” (2014–15)—a web series by Casey Jane Ellison that will temporarily become an artwork in “Surround Audience”—will focus on themes broached by the exhibition and will be shot in the Museum.

Participating artists and groups:

• Nadim Abbas (b. 1980, Hong Kong, China. Lives and works in Hong Kong, China)
• Lawrence Abu Hamdan (b. 1985, Amman, Jordan. Lives and works in London, UK)
• niv Acosta (b. 1988, New York, NY, US. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US)
• Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983, Enugu, Nigeria. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US)
• Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983, Tacoma, WA, US. Lives and works in Doha, Qatar, and London, UK)
• Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili (b. 1979, Tbilisi, Georgia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
• Ed Atkins (b. 1982, Oxford, UK. Lives and works in London, UK)
• Olga Balema (b. 1984, Lviv, Ukraine. Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Berlin, Germany)
• Frank Benson (b. 1976, Norfolk, VA, US. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Sascha Braunig (b. 1983, Vancouver Island, Canada. Lives and works in Portland, ME, US)
• Antoine Catala (b. 1975, Toulouse, France. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Aslı Çavuşoğlu (b. 1982, Istanbul, Turkey. Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey)
• José León Cerrillo (b. 1976, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico)
• Onejoon Che (b. 1979, Seoul, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea)
• Tania Pérez Córdova (b. 1979, Mexico City, Mexico. Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico)
• Verena Dengler (b. 1981, Vienna, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria)
• DIS (Founded 2010, New York, NY, US)
• Aleksandra Domanović (b. 1981, Novi Sad, SFR Yugoslavia. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
• Casey Jane Ellison (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA, US. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY, US)
• Exterritory (Founded 2009, the Extraterritorial Waters)
• Geumhyung Jeong (b. 1980, Seoul, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea)
• Ane Graff (b. 1974, Bodø, Norway. Lives and works in Oslo, Norway, and Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Guan Xiao (b. 1983, Sichuan Province, China. Lives and works in Beijing, China)
• Shadi Habib Allah (b. 1977, Jerusalem, Palestine. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Eloise Hawser (b. 1985, London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK)
• Lena Henke (b. 1982, Warburg, Germany. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Lisa Holzer (b. 1971, Vienna, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria, and Berlin, Germany)
• Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Houston, TX, US. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Renaud Jerez (b. 1982, Narbonne, France. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
• K-HOLE (Founded 2010, New York, NY, US)
• Shreyas Karle (b. 1981, Mumbai, India. Lives and works in Mumbai, India)
• Kiluanji Kia Henda (b. 1979, Luanda, Angola. Lives and works in Luanda, Angola, and Lisbon, Portugal)
• Josh Kline (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA, US. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Eva Kotátková (b. 1982, Prague, Czech Republic. Lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic)
• Donna Kukama (b. 1981, Mafikeng, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa)
• Firenze Lai (b. 1984, Hong Kong, China. Lives and works in Hong Kong, China)
• Oliver Laric (b. 1981, Innsbruck, Austria. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany)
• Li Liao (b. 1982, Hubei, China. Lives and works in Shenzhen, China)
• Rachel Lord (b. 1986, Washington, DC, US. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US)
• Basim Magdy (b. 1977, Assiut, Egypt. Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt, and Basel, Switzerland)
• Nicholas Mangan (b. 1979, Geelong, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia)
• Ashland Mines (b. 1982, Pittsburgh, PA, US. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US)
• Shelly Nadashi (b. 1981, Haifa, Israel. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium)
• Eduardo Navarro (b. 1979, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina)
• Steve Roggenbuck (b. 1987, Harbor Beach, MI, US. Lives and works in Brunswick, ME, US)
• Avery K. Singer (b. 1987, New York, NY, US. Lives and works in New York, NY, US)
• Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (b. 1977, Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
• Martine Syms (b. 1988, Los Angeles, CA, US. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, US)
• Lisa Tan (b. 1973, New York, NY, US. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden)
• Luke Willis Thompson (b. 1988, Auckland, New Zealand. Lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand, and Frankfurt, Germany)
• Peter Wächtler (b. 1979, Hannover, Germany. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium, and Berlin,
  Germany)