Work

Founded in 2009 in New York, US
Débora Delmar * 1986 in Mexico City, lives and works in Mexico City

Débora Delmar mines the iconography and commodities of health-driven lifestyles to address themes of class and upward mobility. Dedicated to the health food trend of “green juice,” her operational juice bar takes its name both from the minting of currency and “MINT”, the acronym for the developing economic powers of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey as emerging markets for investment—countries that often export the fruit that then becomes a much more expensive liquified juice product sold in boutique packaging. Delmar’s juice has been produced in cooperation with a local company. Visitors can relax in Delmar’s juice bar on upcycled eco furniture, surrounded by celebrity green juice paparazzi photos, and a sculptural installation of matcha and wheat-grass infused plaster figures, cast lettuce, and watermelon totem poles.  Commenting on the displacement of value, food as a luxury item, and the marketing and economic structures that underlie trends and health products, the project takes on the perennial “greenwashing” of commodities and how social consciousness is reinforced by consumer habits.

Founded in 2011 in Johannesburg, ZA
Ravi Govender * 1984 in Durban, ZA, lives and works in Geneva, CH
Christopher Bryden McMichael * 1984 in Durban, ZA, lives and works in Johannesburg, ZA
Mpumelelo Jamal Nxedlana * 1985 in Durban, ZA, lives and works in Johannesburg, ZA
Philip Pilekjær * 1988 in Odense, DK, lives and works in Copenhagen
Lex Trickett * 1985 in Durban, ZA, and works in Johannesburg, ZA
Zamani Xolo * 1980 in Durban, ZA, lives and works in Johannesburg, ZA

The collective CUSS Group responds to commercial, cultural, and technological super-hybridity in contemporary South Africa and beyond. Signposted as “Triomf Factory Shop,” their installation appears to be a store filled with products for sale: including a fragrance, a beer, and LCD monitors broadcasting a TV channel, all of which are commissioned works by other South African artists. The shop serves as a virtual “front” for a back room, which is a site of production for a live program of performances. Closed to the public, these events are streamed from behind closed doors into the storefront. CUSS Group’s use of a shop not only speaks to the gap between official presentation and processes of creative production, but it also plays on how in the city politics and national interests that drive biennials, participants are envoys, quasi-exports, quasi-emigrants, of cultural dissemination amid a globalized, though still nationally based creative economy.

Founded in 2013 in Melbourne, AU

Centre for Style is both an internationally touring format and a physical space in Melbourne run by Matthew Linde. Its ephemeral arrangements and gatherings mix haphazard, DIY nonchalance with a large, shifting cast of people—including fashion designers who do not produce traditional collection-based lines and artists who might craft spontaneous, off-brand clothing or props. True to its deconstructive take on fashion and conventions of style, Centre for Style’s new work is an abstracted, chaotic fashion runway-turned-backstage. Filled with detritus and collateral remains, the project foregrounds the invisible, at times messy rituals of event-based mise-en-scènes, reminding us that fashion produces not only clothes but also communities.

* 1968 in Geneva, CH, lives and works in Geneva, CH

Painter Nicolás Fernández might well be said to have had two artistic careers. Initially associated with the Net Art movements of the 1990s, he began to paint over the course of a long-term illness and eventually made his first iPhone paintings—images depicting family relationships, children, and parents. Everything needs its own absence  is the 9th Berlin Biennale’s only traditional oil painting. In a literal inversion of a nursing Madonna, a mother and child are depicted in an Eden-like scene of lush vegetation steeped in a post-natural green. Sourced from a viral photo of a yoga teacher, the work typifies how Fernández abstracts his figures from internet images, advertising, posters found on the street, or his own photographs—and uses the eroticism and ideality of his nudes to add a layer of the sublime to the visual feed of our lives.

* 1987 in Montréal, CA

Yearning for love and success, Julien Ceccaldi’s comic book characters seem to exist in states of sentimental overload and detachment. In this pair of lightboxes, digitally drawn backgrounds are superimposed with hand-painted characters in acrylic. The images feature scenes of disconnect between a hunky man and an emaciated, corpse-like body in a bare interior. Outside we see the flowering branches of a sakura tree and an impossibly close view of the Eiffel Tower, a perennial symbol of romance and a stand-in for cultural hybridity suggesting the adaptation of French culture in Japanese manga and the japonisme of French culture in turn. Together the two pieces create a vertiginous sense of mental and physical displacement paired with a state of emotional disconnect and stasis.

Armen Avanessian * 1973 in Vienna, lives and works in Berlin
Alexander Martos * 1972 in Vienna, lives and works in Vienna
In collaboration with Christopher Roth

DISCREET – An Intelligence Agency for the People is described by Armen Avanessian and Alexander Martos as a para-agency modeled on existing secret services. During a three-week residency at the 9th Berlin Biennale, renegade experts from the fields of the arts, theory, technology, politics, law, hacktivism, and finance analyze and rework some of the core codes of the twenty-first century. Addressing challenges such as post-state sovereignty, global financial feudalism, and new algorithmic regimes, they will establish an agenda for an open-source intelligence service and a post-war society—that is, a society postdating the War on Terror. Occasionally accomplices will drop by to question strategies while providing coaching in specific techniques or offering the deep knowledge, historical context, and data resources that foster open intelligence. Can a small group of individuals with differently “limited” forms of knowledge and little time find answers to the difficult questions of a world where power relationships can no longer be measured on human scale? Is this the birth of a new actor within what has been, until now, the utterly unfree market for secret service providers?