Troika is an artist collective founded in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, and Sebastien Noel. Often working with scientific technologies and mediums including light, electricity, and water, Troika explores the relationship between human lives and technological advancement.
Read MoreTroika has engaged with technology since their early days, as seen in Newton Virus, a software the art collective made in 2004 that applied the law of gravity to desktop icons. Whenever the computer moved in real life, its icons would fall and roll around. After the first version of Newton Virus was collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Troika collaborated with computer programmers to release the software online, although it was short-lived due to technical difficulties.
Over the course of their career, Troika has employed scientific technologies in efforts to control uncontrollable movements.
'Light Drawings' (2012) involved burning paper with an electric charge, with the trajectory of the current made random by dampening the surface with water. The resulting lines are irregular and evocative of forms such as rivers, blood vessels, or plant roots, which are not always manageable by human intervention.
The method used in 'Light Drawings' has been applied to other projects, including the drawing Cartography of Control, which was also the title of Troika's first US solo exhibition at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles in 2014. Among the works on view were installations that made use of light, water, electricity, and mathematical algorithms, through which the artists created illusions of control or chance. The stream of water pouring from a pipe in Testing Time, for example, appears to float upward in front of a LED light, while the curved segments in the suspended sculpture The Sum of All Possibilities seem to shift their formation in perpetuity, while they are actually engineered to move in a 12-minute loop (both 2014).
Troika's interest in the impact of digital technology on human lives has led them to create Borrowed Light (2018), a group of acrylic cases that each contains a transparent slab lined with photographic film. The films represent different colour gradients based on sunsets and sunrises, which the collective found were among one of the most abundant images online and reflect our desires to capture nature.
Borrowed Light was also realised as a large-scale installation at London's Barbican Centre in 2019. Suspended from the ceiling, the installation comprised of a 24-metre-long scroll of photographic film in an imitation of sunset and sunrise.
Selected solo exhibitions include To See a World Through a Grain of Salt, OMR, Mexico City (2021); Borrowed Light, Barbican Centre, London (2018); Everything is and isn't at the same time, Galerie Huit, Hong Kong (2016); Cartography of Control, Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2015); and _Persistent Illusion_s, Daelim Museum, Seoul (2014).
Selected group exhibitions include Mirrors / Mirages, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam (2021); Real Feelings, Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel (2020); Gradation, Patrick Heide Contemporary Art, London (2019); Coding the World, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Drawing Biennale 2017, London (2017); and [un]expected: The Art of Chance, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2016).
Troika's website can be found here and their Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
