Just Jess Mathews

Jess Mathews ‘Untitled (Domestic Chairs)’ 2011

Revital Cohen ‘Life Support’

At night, the sheep is placed on a special platform at the patient’s bedside. The transgenic sheep’s kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient’ s fitsula (a surgicaly enlarged vein). During the night, peristaltic pumps remove waste products from the patient’s blood by pumping it out of the body, through the sheep’s kidney (a natural, organic filtering system) and returning it, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. Each time the “clean” blood is returned to the body, it picks up more waste products from the cells it circulates through, and brings these newly-collected toxins back to the sheep’s kidney to be removed.

The sheep urinates the toxins.

polychroniadis:

‘The Immortal’ by Revital Cohen. “A number of life-support machines are connected to each other, circulating liquids and air in attempt to mimic a biological structure.”

atelierpunkt:

Bharti Kher, “The hot winds that blow from the West”

(via thingsorganizedneatly)

Teresa Margolles

Score Settling 2008

10 carat gold including an inlay of pieces of broken glass

‘Score Settling’ 2008 is based on a series of murders committed by drug dealers in the Sinaloa region of Mexico. Motivated by revenge and to set an example, these killings are perpetrated in the street by the narcos, who shoot their victims in their cars. Margolles collects the glass fragments of the shot-out windscreens left on the asphalt and then commissions jewellery resembling that typically worn by the narcos, replacing the inlays of precious stones with little pieces of broken glass. Exploring the notion of sculpture as a testimony of an absent body, the artist uses the memorial value of the vestige, reflecting an understanding that ‘what remains is also what resists the most’.

Cinthia Marcelle

Leitmotiv 2011

Video, projection, colour, sound

Tate Modern, Gallery 2: No Lone Zone

Influenced by performance, Cinthia Marcelle uses video to capture a poetic and formal approach of events she orchestrates. Carefully choreographed repetitive actions that disrupt the usual order of things and which are often perceived as absurd, create situations that question our notions of conventional behavior and social structure. 

In Leitmotiv, Cinthia Marcelle starts by a high angle shot of a perfect geometrically divided cement surface coupled by a non-defined sound of water.  Slowly, water currents that appear in every side suggesting the beginning of a flood then wet the area. In an effort to contain the pool of water in the center of the frame, a collective action of sweeping brooms creates a «tidal wave» through volume and rhythm. A new kind of nature produced by a human action is revealed.  “The abstract forms of the waves resemble the surface of a painting in progress - thus presenting the floor/canvas as a territory of constant reformulation” . The action concludes with a perfect dissipation of the water and, the only perception that is left is sound.

Berlin, Germany: The light and sound installation Five Minutes Of Pure Sculpture by British artist Anthony McCall Visitors at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum