RITES DE PASSAGE: GCC, DANIEL KELLER, KATJA NOVITSKOVA, AVERY SINGER, SLAVS AND TATARS, ANNA UDDENBERG

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oft-forgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Their paper works Letter to Abriskil and Histoire du Monde Slave et Tatar explore alternative ways of grasping the passage of time as well as the passing on of cultural narratives. 

Katja Novitskova’s works includes digital cutouts, sculptures, and installations as well as collaborative projects and artist publications. In her work she examines ecological and information systems, through an engagement with digital data, exploring the co-evolution of planetary ecosystems and species and the competing forces of human expansion and biodiversity.

Avery Singer’s digital still lifes represent an unfamiliar visual reality of narrative painting. The iconographically complex airbrush paintings evoke vintage computer aesthetics: Singer’s pictorial language plays with the history of visual technologies, from the pre-photographic to the post-digital. In her new series of prints, abstract patterns sketch out new spaces, human bodies dissolve into the fuzziness of blown up geometric forms while lens flare effects and blue glow dazzle the spectator’s vision. On a stage of artificial light the human elements fade from the spotlight.

Through the feedback loop of consumerist culture Anna Uddenberg investigates how body culture, spirituality, and self-staging are intertwined with the mediation and production of subjectivity by new technologies and forms of circulation. Her practice is a space for reflecting on taste/class, appropriation, and sexuality, which integrates

earlier approaches to gender theory while pushing these questions into new and intensively material territories.

Daniel Keller’s wide-ranging artistic output engages with issues at the intersection of economics, technology, culture and collaboration. His current focus is on notions of progress, technological disruption, and ‘exit’ — all viewed from the perspective of the ‘prosumer imagineer’ artist operating within the global networked economy. As half of Aids-3D, he has exhibited internationally since 2007. In 2012 he became Director of Absolute Vitality Inc., a Wyoming based corporation-sculpture co-owned by the artist, his gallery and a group of private collectors.

GCC, an acronym that does not necessarily stand for but alludes to the Gulf Cooperative Council (the intergovernmental political and economic partnership that connects six countries in the region), is an artist “delegation” or collective composed of eight members, all of which have strong ties to the Arabian Gulf region of the Middle East. Since its debut at Sultan Gallery, Kuwait, the group has continued to address the shifting systems of power in the Gulf region and abroad. GCC live between Kuwait, New York, Amsterdam, London, and Berlin. Apart from several summits held in Switzerland, Kuwait, France and, most recently, New York, Whatsapp is the group’s

primary mode of communication.