Platform stages large-scale artworks, installations and commissions across Piers 92 & 94. Now in its second edition, the 2018 Platform section, entitled The Contingent and curated by Jen Mergel, features 15 site-responsive projects by internationally acclaimed artists. State of the Arts NYC selected several installations that they feel are compelling and MUST SEE at the fair.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Wang updates her social sculpture The Gallery for its U.S. debut. Sited at the front of Pier 94, Wang’s fluorescent-lit “booth” hosts hourly exhibitions by local and international artists who responded to her online open call. Part Warholian factory for fifteen-minute fame, part 21st-century hack of art-world exclusivity, the result is what Wang calls her “software crack” to recode an old system with a “plug-in” of new artistic energy and critique.
ARTIST BIO
(b. 1983 in Yichang, Hubei, China) graduated from China Academy of Art with a B.F.A. in 2007 and graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (M.F.A.) in 2011.
Wang Xin’s artworks take the form of installations, moving images and new media. Unconsciousness, art world systems, and posthumanism are key features in her creation. She frequently uses language and signs to challenge the status of the artist and the functioning of the art market today. The impact of her bold slogans provides a satirical reading to her own position and relation to the art world, as well as a critique of the larger ecosystem of art. She is also a certificated hypnotist and often explores the creative ways to use hypnosis in art. Since 2014, Wang Xin has cooperated with Imago Kinetics and founded the 8HZ Hypnosis Lab in Imago Kinetics’ Art Center in Hangzhou. Wang Xin is also the founder of “The Gallery” project, which is an alternative art space/system.
Wang Xin’s solo exhibitions include The Must-See Art Show Where You Can Find 10,000 Artists, de Sarthe, Hong Kong (2017); Every Artist Should have a Solo Show, de Sarthe, Beijing, China (2016); 8 HZ Hypnosis Lab, MoCA Pavilion Shanghai, China (2015); The Gallery, C-Space, Beijing, China (2014); Let’s Play in the Name of Art, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2013). She has also has exhibited her artwork internationally in group exhibitions and projects including: com/.cn – Co-presented by KAF and MoMA PS1, K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong & Shanghai, China (2017-18); Light Up Therapy Resort, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2017-18); Shanghai Galaxy II, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2017-18); Being Information, SSSTART, Shanghai, China (2017); Take Me Out, Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2016); Now You See: New Chinese Video Art from the Collection of Dr. Michael I. Jacobs, Whitebox Art Center, New York, USA (2014); Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, Shenzhen, China (2012) and Musrara Mix Festival, Jerusalem, Israel (2011).
In 2007, Wang Xin was the recipient for the Pierre Huber Creation Prize Award of Excellence.
Wang Xin currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Smilde stages his first “live” images with a theatrical set as a site for the repeated generation of a cloud. On this same set, Smilde produced countless clouds by hand to capture a single instant by photograph. Here, he invites us to anticipate, witness, perhaps even photograph each fleeting form that emerges and fades beyond the edges of the picture, into our present space. Which image is more real?
ARTIST BIO
Berndnaut Smilde (b. 1978 in Groningen, The Netherlands) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Smilde holds an MA from the Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen. Selected exhibitions include:Saatchi Gallery, London (2017); RWA Bristol,(2017); Museum Kranenburgh,(2016); LIAN Contemporary Art Space, Shanghai(solo)(2015);FotoMuseum,Antwerp,(2015); Ronchini Gallery, London (solo) (2014);Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, (solo)(2013). Awards include a START stipend fromThe Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, the FORM Artists’ Residency, Perth and Kings County Hospital, New York.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Campbell stages an immersive installation that intersects scenes from two “preinternet” histories where women controlled the message. 19th-century furniture from a telegraph switchboard collides with an office set from the 1980 movie 9-to-5, in which a female trio abducts their sexist boss and runs the business. Titled “nine to five” in Morse code, Campbell’s work wrinkles time as an echo to our present.
ARTIST BIO
Campbell (b. 1971 in Dwight, IL) is known for her drawings, sculpture, and architectural interventions often involving duplication and mirroring. Beth Campbell choreographs spaces, crafts uncanny objects, and maps thought. Last year the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum presented a solo survey of Campbell’s work and she has had previous solo projects with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Public Art Fund. In addition she has shown at various national and international museums and galleries including the Manifesta 7- Trento, Italy, Carnegie Museum of Art, Greater NY- PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Mercosul Biennial- Porto Alegre, Brazil, Ok Center for Contemporary Art- Linz, Austria, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Minneapolis Institute of Art. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Memorial Fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She is currently represented by Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie and Kate Werble Gallery. She is presenting a Platform Project with Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Sibande debuts her avatar, Sophie, in New York to visualize timely themes of women’s power boiling over. In regal purple, Sophie waves a cloth, whether of welcome, warning or surrender to her bursting anger. The Zulu expression Wavuka inja ebomvu (“she turned into a red dog”) lunges outward as a universal metaphor for what Sibande observes: “Anger is a dangerous animal.”
ARTIST BIO
Mary Sibande (b. 1982 in Barberton, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Studying visual arts, at the Witwatersrand Technikon and University of Johannesburg, Sibande’s work not only engages as an interrogator of the current intersections of race, gender and labor in South Africa, but continues to actively rewrite her own families legacy of forced domestic work imposed by the then Apartheid State. Sibande employs the human form as a vehicle through photography and sculpture as a focused critique on the stereotypical depictions of women, particularly black women in South Africa. The body, for Sibande, and particularly how we clothe it, is the site where this history is contested and where Sibande’s own fantasies can play out.
Notable exhibitions to date include Long Live the Dead Queen at Gallery MOMO (Johannesburg: 2009); at MAC/VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain di Val-de-Marne (Paris, France: 2013); Mary Sibande and Sophie Ntombikayise Take Central Court at Spencer Museum of Art (University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas: 2013); and The Purple Shall Govern at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival (Grahamstown, South Africa: 2013); at Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town: 2014); at the Standard Bank Gallery (Johannesburg: 2014). Select group exhibitions include , Another Antipodes/urban axis 017 (Perth, Australia: 2017); South Africa: The Art of a Nation at the British Museum (London, UK: 2016); Re(as)sisting Narratives at Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands: 2016); at District Six Museum (Cape Town: 2016); the Lyon Biennale (Lyon, France: 2013); and the 54th Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy: 2011), amongst others.
