April 9 to 12, 2016
Pyongyang, NK, +850 2 381 2134

In April of 2016, there was a sudden flurry of banal images across my Instagram — a fluorescent train interior, a bleached highway, a public monument — that would not have garnered further attention were it not for the accompanying hashtags: #northkorea, #pyongyang, #exhibition. These may well have been tagged #mars, but such is the reveled territory of Zurich’s Random Institute, an enigmatic art project by Sandino Scheidegger and Luca Müller. The Institute often holds exhibitions within such inaccessible areas of no-place (the transliteration of utopia): places of the virtual, the impermanent. Using the artist and the exhibition as medium, each project imagines new borders to trace the untraceable elements of our world through art, and even exhibition, as idea, challenging the viewer’s belief that the show happened at all. Pairing with curator Anna Hugo, Random Institute’s most recent project, “All the Lights We Cannot See,” is perhaps their most pioneering trek into such intangible terrain.

“All the Lights We Cannot See” exhibited the work of nine international artists in Pyongyang, North Korea from April 9 to 12, on the 23rd floor of the Yanggakdo International Hotel. The show was not discussed in North Korean news, or anywhere at all. According to the omnipotence of Google, this exhibition is virtually nonexistent and yet, virtually, it is: a slick photo stream on Random Institute’s website reveals the chalk pinks and cheap lacquer of a vaguely Asian, two-bed hotel room. The photos seems a bit like an Airbnb ad, yet within the normality, punctuations: Ragnheidur Karadottir’s bubblegum-pink ball sporting cheerful streamers, Birdie (2016), balances on the edge of the nightstand; a jacket called Naked Bombers (2016), by Simon Mullan, hangs from the wall like the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement (1536–41), turned inside-out and molting its flocked flesh. There is an iPhone or two pictured that are deceptively mundane, but then a levitating fork pricks the wall, Juan Betancurth’s Movement No.6 (2016); an ominous chocolate bar rests on the velour settee in Alison Kuo’s Personal Chocolate (2016); and a row of paradisiacal beach towels, Sulking Souvenir,(2013) by Clifford E. Bruckmann, bear the names of imaginary getaways as seemingly inaccessible as this clandestine art project.

Bruckmann’s sculptures are a poignant centerpiece to the exhibit as utopia. The no-place seems to be the non-existent ideal that Random Istitute is frequently tracing: just as Bruckmann creates a souvenir from the paradise he never saw, RI has created an exhibition that, according to them, “went virtually unnoticed.” “All the Lights We Cannot See” directly injected the intangible ideals of utopia into the dystopic reality of North Korea, and most covertly: even the black sheets of the poorly made hotel beds are the work of French artist Achraf Touloub, highlighting the demand for secrecy on the part of both the art and its environment. Indeed, these objects are as careful as they should be, all falling within the limits of allowance when traveling to North Korea (e.g. visitors are advised that chocolates make a lovely gift for North Korean women). Thankfully, definitions of contemporary art are more generous than state security.

The artists of the North Korean exhibit are contractually obligated to silence by the Institute, their only legal response to questions about it being: “I’m not supposed to talk about it.” Outside of Random Institute’s website, searching online for “All the Lights We Cannot See” will only direct you to a New York Times best-selling novel of the same name (the proverbial red herring), or a few of the participating artists’ CVs. So we are presented with the shell of an exhibition, the lamination of an event, but also the muffled experience of non-experience; only Scheidegger and Hugo, and perhaps a North Korean maid or minder, bore witness to this show. Random Institute has archived “All the Lights We Cannot See” and moved on (though they recently released their exhibition catalog: a limited edition of the Pyongyang Times that has been implanted with a mocked-up review of the show).

Other Random Institute projects have occurred within similarly remote contexts of the no-place: furniture catalogs, a transatlantic Filipino boat, in a book buried underground, or traced — by rock, dream or GIF — within a barren patch of Iceland the RI has named Kunsthalle Tropical. A “non-profit exhibition field that does not belong to anyone,” Kunsthalle Tropical examines the immaterial and the ephemeral or, as filmmaker Chris Marker describes such phenomena, “the impermanence of things”: museums that will melt under the rare rains of the Icelandic desert, remains of hovering helium from a 1969 exhibition by Robert Barry, and verbal artworks to be shouted, via megaphone, from the sky (attempted and failed five times). The insistence is a detachment of the art from its physical audience, isolating — or even disappearing — the art(ist) to the essential element of idea.

This is a far cry from the heavy-handed, wine-fueled mobs of the typical gallery scene: these exhibitions ask for silence and faith over networks and market values. Being of absence and no-place, this is a new approach to the art space that materializes that virtual space we are all too familiar with. They redefine the gallery, the museum and the library as physical spaces newly transformed (updated) by their virtual counterparts. It is a grand and impressive effort to materialize nascent philosophies of the virtual world physically, to weigh that which is hanging in the air.

There is little difference between “All the Lights We Cannot See” and a missed exhibition caught up with online. Having stared across so many white walls, the audience may be just as keen to stare into the MacBook’s own rare rectangle. Perhaps what Random Institute understands so well in its utopic tracing, better than many post-Internet artists, is the definition of virtual: not physically existing but made to appear.

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September 10 through October 19, 2013
71 Morton Street
New York City, 212-255-7872

The tendency among contemporary artists to move toward an interdisciplinary practice has never been greater. There appears to be an anxiety around the idea of executing works in a singular mode for fear of displaying a one-dimensional identity. Today, young artists, perhaps too primed by a business model of success, aspire to diversify their portfolios, become well-rounded innovators, and disseminate their developed and “branded” personal languages as far and wide as possible. However, there are of course, several strong exceptions to this rule, embodied in the work of individual artists, maintaining a steady focus within the general dialogue of specific media. For example, there is currently a movement in photography that advances the conversation around the medium, partially through a combination of conventional concern for formal and technical expertise with an unconventional approach to the conceptual aspect of image-making. Often cited members of this group include Michele Abeles, Anne Collier, Roe Ethridge, Annette Kelm, Elad Lassry, and Eileen Quinlan, each of whom have been featured in the past five iterations of the Museum of Modern Art’s “New Photography” exhibition series. These photographers each skew their chosen subject matter through an ostensibly “objective” lens.

Another photographer who seemingly fits into this widely expansive and now well-established niche is the Los Angeles-based Norwegian Torbjørn Rødland. Yet despite initial superficial signifiers, Rødland’s cryptic pictures are at once more direct and more off-kilter than many of his contemporaries. Specifically, in his coyly refined debut exhibition at Algus Greenspon, the artist displays an amalgamated aptitude for color and composition, but his uncanny awareness of narrative implications via stinted social associations is what gives these photographs their true allure and authority.

The first photograph one encounters is Narrative Stasis (Studio Kabuki) (2008-13), a deadpan shot of an unidentified person dressed in traditional kabuki accoutrement, their gender and ethnicity not quite clear. The work’s title serves as an ironically fitting introduction to this individual exhibition, as well as the artist’s overarching practice—the stylized story is stabilized through disparate chapters, each given their own peculiar swagger. This is also the first of many works reminiscent of film without being bound to film’s narrative powers. A smiling child in a brightly lit cage, a cropped body wrapped in sausage links like a mummy—absurd, juvenile ideas on paper, yet haunting as the stills of an imaginary movie. These cinematic images are evocative of Chris Marker and William Eggleston, whose work similarly begs the viewer to ask “who” and “why?” However, the surreal displacement of Rødland’s photographs keeps them at a distance from his forebears’ more documentary style of image-making.

In Rødland’s work, conception and perception of imagery is often manipulated with equal parts illusion and allusion, offering an unusual dramatic sense and blurring the line between prescription and coincidence, rarely seen in photography or art in general. This is aptly demonstrated in such conceivably unrelated works as Partner, Bathroom Tiles, The Corner, and Thorns. Partner (2008-13) contains two figures—a young Japanese girl awkwardly hugging a cheap Greek bust, their heads together, her biting her lip and looking away, acting the part of a cute stereotype as if she is endorsing something, except without much charisma or a slogan. Bathroom Tiles (2011-13), at first glance, appears to be an uncomfortably sexy photograph—red toe nail polish, wet feet, sterile environment—though upon closer inspection, the feet are not wet from water and soap lather, but rather some unspecified congealed substance, forcing the woman’s left foot’s toes to spread like Dr. Spock’s fingers, invoking a mood that is less seductive than perplexing. The Corner (2008-13) and Thorns (2011-13) are ghostly, black and white composite interior/exterior photos, giving new meaning to the phrase “mirror image.” These paused and poised moments speak to many of the placid yet unnerving 1970s images taken of forced entries, vandalized homes, or wrecked movie lots by the Los Angeles photographer John Divola. Like Divola’s investigations, Rødland here too attempts to hybridize painting, photography, and sculpture with a performative slant, as well as include still-life, landscape, and arguably portraiture all into one flat picture—a gesture one would think to be ridiculously futile and mildly pretentious, but as is the case with Divola it is jarring in it its instinctive, no frills poetics.

Throughout the exhibition, there is a proven consistency in both the lighting and staging of the subjects and the slick production (and post-production) of each of the images, mimicking both current art documentation and high-end advertising, namely fashion campaigns and product placement. This approach suggests a serious conceptual tone with a hint of satire. A work such as Twintailed Siren (2011-13), which depicts an empty Starbucks iced beverage cup precariously placed between a young woman’s smooth, clenched butt cheeks certainly would not look out of place in a DIS Magazine spread, but the surrounding works re-contextualize the starkness and cleverness of this gesture and supplement poignancy to the implicit erotic humor.

The final image of the exhibition, Black Ducati (2011-13) brims with subdued stimulation. Two models are centered in the frame, sitting on a black Ducati motorcycle—one is scantily clad, the other is nude; one is staring at the camera, the other is helmeted and looking down. Both seem to be unsure whether to be enticing, intimidating, or dejected—a savvy counterpoint to the stoic Kabuki portrait which prefaces the exhibition. As an artist, Rødland appears to take pleasure in the covert discomfort derived from slight alterations or deviations from recognizable information, and minor nuances and idiosyncrasies within the photographic presentation of said information. By maintaining a constant and restrained manner of working in contrast to the unfettered range of subject matter he presents, Rødland creates a surprising lag between recognition and cognition. In this way, he proves to not only be interested in the advancement of photography as a medium, but one could also argue, the advocating of a relationship shift in viewing and experiencing. Perhaps this notion alone doesn’t set him apart, but the resulting images do.

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