Cheng Ran, In Course of the Miraculous, 2015 (still). Wide-screen HD film, 5.1 surround sound, color; 468 min. Courtesy the artist, K11 Art Foundation, Erlenmeyer Foundation, and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.
This month, The New Museum opens two new exhibits from Pipilotti Rist and Cheng Ran. On view October 19th, 2016 through January 15th will be Cheng Ran’s first solo exhibition in the United States. A week later on October 26, 2016, The New Museum will debut the first New York survey of the work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, the show runs through January 8, 2017.
Cheng Ran | Diary Of A Madman
The New Museum – Lobby Gallery
235 Bowery, NYC 10002
October 19, 2016 – January 15, 2017
Diary Of A Madman is Cheng Ran’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and features a new multi-video installation in the New Museum’s Lobby Gallery. The exhibition marks the culmination of his three-month residency at the New Museum, initiated in partnership with K11 Art Foundation.
Since 2005, Cheng has been producing film and video works that draw widely from both Western and Chinese literature, poetry, cinema, and visual culture, fabricating new narratives that combine myths and historical events. “Cheng Ran: Diary of a Madman” borrows its title from what is widely considered China’s first modern short story, written by Lu Xun in 1918. Just as Lu Xun’s story comprises first-person narratives of a character at the margins of society who gradually turns mad, Cheng’s fifteen new videos take the form of diaristic vignettes that reveal a larger assessment of a foreign place through the eyes of an outsider. As a first-time visitor to the United States, Cheng approaches New York already familiar with iconic and cinematic images of the city, simultaneously intending to find and capture what is typically excluded from such views.
Pipilotti Rist, Gnade Donau Gnade (Mercy Danube Mercy), 2013/15. Installation view: “Komm Schatz, wir stellen die Medien um & fangen nochmals von vorne an,” Kunsthalle Krems, Austria, 2015. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine. Photo: Lisa Rast.
Pipilotti Rist | Pixel Forest
The New Museum – 2nd, 3rd, & 4th Fl.
235 Bowery, NYC 10002
October 26, 2016 – January 8, 2017
Over the past thirty years, Pipilotti Rist has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her works envelop viewers in kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological. Referring to her art as a “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” Rist brings viewers into encounters with the textures, forms, and functions of the living universe around us.
Occupying the three main floors of the Museum, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest will be the most comprehensive presentation of Rist’s work in New York to date. It will include work spanning the artist’s entire career, from her early single-channel videos of the 1980s, which explore the representation of the female body in popular culture, to her recent expansive video installations, which transform architectural spaces into massive dreamlike environments enhanced by hypnotic musical scores. Featuring a new installation created specifically for this presentation, the exhibition will also reveal connections between the development of Rist’s art and the evolution of contemporary technologies.
