SOCIÉTÉ

If you’re yearning for sensory overload, head directly to Société’s solo presentation of the young Chinese artist Lu Yang. For the fair, Lu created four films (all 2019) featuring four different characters—half-robots, half-gods—which play on elevated screens, while lightboxes in the same style hang on the walls. Read more on Artsy.LINEBREAK

“I feel like I have a soul now,” Bunny Rogers said on the phone from Frankfurt, days after the opening of her exhibition Pectus Excavatum at the Museum für Moderne Kunst. Following her 2017 Whitney solo exhibition Brig Und Ladder, which served to complete a trilogy of installations about the Columbine High School massacre, the American-born artist retreated into a year-long hermitage. Read more on Interview.LINEBREAK

Questioning how much we think we know, especially within a broader consideration of animal intelligence, is one of the main focuses of the show at MMK Frankfurt. I define intelligence as sensitivity, and in those terms, animals such as squid, octopi, and whales are indicative of the extreme sensory capabilities that we’ve barely scraped the surface of. Read and watch on ARTFORUM.LINEBREAK

Über die Lebensweise von Riesenkalmaren und Teenagern ist wenig bekannt, das legt zumindest eine Ausstellung in Frankfurt nahe. Wie die Künstlerin Bunny Rogers tief in die Welt der Adoleszenz blicken lässt. Read in German on Monopol Magazine.LINEBREAK

Cortright’s choice of subject lands on the perfect place along the art history spectrum for this conversation. The dozen or so works are variations on the floral still life genre, and “Lucky Duck Lights Out,” the exhibition title, references two varieties of dahlia, the former a sunny yellow and the latter, a velvety scarlet(…) Read more on ARTILLERYMAG.LINEBREAK

Lu Yang videos burn themselves onto our retinas. Glaring and heady, they construct narratives of self-mutilation, which are used by the artist as a process of enlightenment. Both Yang’s best-known video installations, Delusional Mandala (2015) and Delusional Crime and Punishment (2016), tell the story of a bizarrely manufactured human figure (a 3D genderless simulation of Yang herself) stuck in limbo between a life of synthetic potential and its inevitable condemnation. Read more on Art Basel.LINEBREAK

The Whitney Biennial 2019 is curated by Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, the show runs from May 17 to September 22. Read more on Whitney Museum website.LINEBREAK

Lu might be driven by a similar desire, joining the dots between Buddhism, neuroscience and biology in an oeuvre that resembles a manga franchise populated by a psychotic cast of gods, demons and cyborgs – as well as the artist herself. While Capra’s new-age tome sought to attune ‘modern’ scientific minds in the West to the ‘ancient wisdom’ of Eastern spirituality, Lu’s sciencefiction approach to religious iconography is a joyously accelerationist affair, fusing inquiries into consciousness and control in a dizzying cosmological cocktail. Read the full feature in Frieze Magazine.LINEBREAK

Im Zweifelsfall ist das Material wichtiger als die Identität des Künstlers: Eine Schau in Frankfurt zeigt Arbeiten der amerikanischen Bildhauerin Bunny Rogers. Read in German on Süddeutsche Zeitung.LINEBREAK

The first name that jumps to my mind is Lu Yang, surname Lu, a new media artist born and based in Shanghai, who we recently hosted here in Chicago for a talk. Her fame has shot up over recent years, and the work is fascinating.(…) Read more on artnet news.LINEBREAK

The fact that people couldn’t enter made it a diorama, it flattened it. In a way, it was like a real life Neopets gallery. (…) Read full interview on Rhizome.LINEBREAK

”The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics” features sixteen works from throughout net art history, showcasing a wide range of forms—websites, software, sculpture, graphics, books, and merchandise—while offering a space for considering the internet as social process, material infrastructure, and lived experience. Among the works on view is Sister Unn’s (2012), an installation by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski based on a mysterious storefront in Queens that led passersby to an equally enigmatic website, exemplifying the links between real and virtual space. On view at New Museum, New York.LINEBREAK

“Floating in a purplish, cloudy outer space, the avatar undergoes stereotaxy, a high-tech form of minimally incisive brain surgery, which gives her the consciousness and form of a god. But as the body’s audacious mutability is revealed, so is its fragility: the artist succumbs to death, and is whisked to the afterlife in an ornate, dust-churning hearse. A cartwheeling, distorted sound track by DJ Cavia666 escorts the video to its end…”LINEBREAKThis text appears in Spike #58. You can buy it in Spike online shop.LINEBREAK

Two cofounders of the algae-bar start-up Nonfood, artist Sean Raspet and writer Lucy Chinen, tell me that they see the protein-bar format as a way to introduce consumers to algae as an ecologically sustainable staple food.“In some of the ideas we had, when we were doing five things that were new, it got to be so people wouldn’t know what to do with it,” says Raspet, who worked as a flavorist for the notorious liquid-meal start-up Soylent before starting Nonfood. Read more on Topic.com.LINEBREAK

Just as Cortright used the default effects that came with her camera, she also treated YouTube metadata as a readymade. She copied a string of terms often used by spam accounts on the platform, which were designed to draw in viewers who were trawling for titillating or offensive material, and pasted it into the keyword field for her own video. This led to numerous angry and confused commenters, with whom Cortright often engaged in all-out flame wars. Read more on Google Art and Culture.LINEBREAK

Future Shock! From Video Games to Art with Lu Yang at China Institute

Watch full talk on YouTube.LINEBREAK

Mit drei Ausstellungen ist Bunny Rogers in ihrer Heimat USA bekannt geworden, darin beschäftigte sie sich mit dem Columbine-Schulmassaker von 1999, die Künstlerin war zu diesem Zeitpunkt Mitte 20. Jetzt ist sie ein paar Jahre älter, derzeit Gastprofessorin an der Städelschule und hat für den besonderen Ort Zollamt des Museums für Moderne Kunst eine Installation erarbeitet, in der es zum ersten Mal überhaupt nicht um Columbine geht, wie sie selbst sagt. Read in German on Frankfurter Rundschau.LINEBREAK

Puh, das muss man erst mal ver­dau­en, was Bun­ny Ro­gers meint: Die Er­in­ne­rung an den Lie­b­lings­zei­chen­trick­film ist ge­n­au­so real wie die Er­in­ne­rung an ei­nen to­ten, ge­lieb­ten Men­schen. Ist der To­te et­wa nicht per­sön­li­cher? Read in German on Main-Echo.LINEBREAK

A show at the New Museum celebrates the completion of Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, a two-year project to preserve and archive digital artworks that were in danger of disappearing. Read more about Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski’s Sister Unn’s project on New York Times.LINEBREAK