Images are not what they used to be. Or put a little more precisely, images are not for who they used to be for. Known for his in-depth investigations of contemporary state surveillance, the American artist Trevor Paglen has been focusing for the past several years on the rise of machine vision, an expanding realm of images made by machines for...
ImageNet will remove 600,000 images of people stored on its database after an art project exposed racial bias in the program's artificial intelligence system. Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects.
Looking at the work of Cui Jie from a northern European perspective, the first error is probably to think you're seeing some form of lament for a modernist past. That narrative is fairly familiar now, based on a longing for the largest-scale remnants of the material culture of postwar social democracy or state socialism—the buildings they...
There is something profoundly uncanny about seeing Cindy Sherman in person for the first time. When she greets me at the door of her SoHo studio one afternoon in April, casually dressed and wearing no obvious make-up, I recognise her features, but not, exactly, her face. For more than 40 years, Sherman has appeared in nearly all of her work, but...
Art Basel 2019 opens to the public on Thursday, June 13, with two preview days, on June 11 and 12. Some 290 galleries from 34 countries will show work at the Swiss fair, which runs through June 16.
For this exhibition, he has been thinking about water and how it has functioned as a vehicle for magical thinking throughout history, from the belief in sea monsters and other early legends to the pseudoscience of water memory used in homeopathic medicine today. Themes of deluge and the environment reveal themselves, and the work explores how...
VOGUE POLSKA debuted in February 2018 and was instantly embroiled—perhaps by design—in heated debates around Polish national identity and self-image. When Condé Nast announced the magazine's forthcoming launch in 2017, the news was received by many in Poland as confirmation that they had truly arrived as equals in the eyes of the...
US photographer Trevor Paglen, best known for his striking images of telecommunications and national security infrastructure, studies 'ungraspable architecture': radio wave transmissions, secret missile ranges, N.S.A. choke points, surveillance and combat drones that alter the very conditions of visibility. His geographic research and photography...
Indie Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won the £40,000 Artes Mundi contemporary art prize. The judges said his film Invisibility was 'a powerful weapon in these turbulent times'. The 48-year-old gave a UK premiere to his dream-like work, projected over two screens and showing two figures rising from their beds in separate rooms....
With the impending winter melancholy yet awaiting behind glitter-laden holiday vitrines and a few illusively warm afternoons, art galleries contribute to the season's festivities with ambitious solo exhibitions, showcasing the newest by art world key players and emerging talents. Bookended by the fall's back-to-school shows and Art Basel Miami...
Tell me about the installation at Metro Pictures. This show is very much a sculpture show. It's a culmination of an interest in materials and objects that travel. I have been looking at how a material is extracted from wherever it's from, how it's traded, how it's taking shape, and the intentions that go into the making of objects as opposed...
The billboards going up around the country this week will have a familiar message for this midterm election: Vote. But featuring images of protests and reminders of the 2016 election, produced by some of the country's best-known artists, the billboards—one for each of the 50 states—will look nothing like your average political...
Strange Days: Memories of the Future is overwhelming: complex, at times annoying and confusing, repetitive, uplifting and baffling. Like life, really. Films and videos by 21 artists are spread over three floors of the Store X on London's Strand.
Catherine Sullivan is a Chicago-based artist whose films and installations have been shown only spottily in New York, and we're the poorer for it. The last piece of hers I saw was Triangle of Need (2007) at Metro Pictures, and that was more than 10 years ago. (Somehow, her 2016 collaboration with the composers George Lewis and Sean Griffin...
America is a country full of contradictions that I would synthesise in two opposing drives: political activism, aggregation and social promotion versus a reactionary and deeply conservative attitude. As in all syntheses, many nuances are obviously lost, but I think that, by looking at your art work, you know how to expose, with surprising ability...
If there is a central purpose that guides the eclectic work of Trevor Paglen, it is perhaps the desire to create art that, as he said during a recent lecture, 'gives us a tiny glimpse of how the rules of the world might be different'. In Sites Unseen, an expansive survey that recently opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington...
The state of the "millennial" is a complex and nebulous thing. Some define Generation X by its widespread affinity for decorative succulents. Some note an eye for a very specific, and hotly debated, shade of apricot-salmon pink. Others scorn millennials for the remorseless, cold-blooded murder of wine corks, the napkin industry, and...
I haven’t seen anyone capture our current state of disconnect better than Josh Kline does in Evidence, a show of work by seven artists, himself included, that he curated for Metro Pictures. In the front room, Oto Gillen’s handsome photographs of ominous Wall Street skyscrapers and Allyson Vieira’s apocalyptically cheery wall-mounted arrows made...
Cui Jie's paintings are largely based on her continuous study of the architectural landscape in the three cities in which she has lived: Shanghai, where she was born and grew up, Hangzhou, where she attended the National Art Academy, and Beijing, where she currently lives and works. She observed at first hand the outstanding transformation that...
The Shanghai-based artist Cui Jie is now represented by the galleries Metro Pictures (of New York), Pilar Corrias (London), and Antenna Space (Shanghai).
'The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue', quipped the American writer Dorothy Parker. I'd like to think that Parker, whose poetry was once dismissed as 'flapper verse' in the New York Times, would have appreciated Paulina Ołowska's Amoresques: An Intellectual Cocktail of Female Erotica, a solo exhibition that...
Cryptozoology, the study of hidden animals, has its origins in the Greek word kryptos, meaning concealed or enigmatic. According to the International Cryptozoology Museum, located in Portland, Maine, cryptozoology 'has moved from a shadowy world of travelogues to academic respectability and beyond.' How far beyond is uncertain, but the roster of...
In 1989, British author JG Ballard published The Enormous Space, a short story about Gerald Ballantyne, a man who withdraws from the world and fortifies himself in his abode, not due to agoraphobia but to 'experiment' with reducing his immediate environment to nothing but his house, committing what is in effect a slow suicide. OCAT Shenzhen's...
I am interested in moving towards uncertainty. My work offers attempts to reinscribe or open up the material I'm looking at and make it less categorical. I feel more comfortable with the idea of objectivity—or even authenticity—when it's not bound to a single reality or single narrative.