
Ken Okiishi‘s Being and/or Time consists of every photo and screenshot recorded on Okiishi’s phone over a period of three years (2013–2016), flickering in chronological order at 24 images/frames per second, with over 25,000 images in total. The compression of existence in the digital/IRL era, when the body was required to be as if everywhere at once, finds its recorded time-image. The artist made the work in a period of total cognitive breakdown, in a process Okiishi has described as ‘attempting to re-enmesh externally stored image-memory with the internal experience-memory of the brain.’
Ken Okiishi works in disparate media systems. His works hover over and within relationships between matter and memory, perception and action, image-networks and language-systems, technology and emotion. Working through and with multiple mediums in fused simultaneity (video/painting, writing/video, object-circulation/ image-circulation, currency/sculpture, etc.), he incites moments when the ‘real world’ loses its coherence and where languages and images fall apart. As Okiishi subverts the material claims of the media systems he works with, the glitches that occur illuminate spaces for the production of something other than what has already been. Ken Okiishi lives and works in New York and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: Solar/Data/Matter: Sobreteixims i escultures, 1972, 1968, 2016, 1978, Fundació Gaspar, Barcelona (2016); Porous Feedback, Arbeiterkammer Wien, Vienna (2015); Gestures, data, feedback, Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2015); Screen Presence, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Reena Spaulings, New York (2014); gesture/data, Pilar Corrias, London; (List Projects) Ken Okiishi, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); The Very Quick of the Word, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies (2013); Gino/Marcel Duchamp on Streeteast.com, Mathew, Berlin (2012); (Goodbye to), Take Ninagawa, Tokyo (2012); (Goodbye to) Manhattan, Alex Zachary, New York (2010); and (Goodbye to) Manhattan, Mehringdamm 72, Berlin (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: Performing Time, Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai (2016); Cut to Swipe, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2015); Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London (2013); Speculations on Anonymous Materials, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel 2013); Version Control, Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013); Liebe ist Kälter als das Kapital [Love is Colder than Capital], Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013); Perfect Man II, White Columns, New York (2012); The Log-0-Rithmic, GAMeC, Bergamo (2012).



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