High Line Art is pleased to announce its fall program, including two new commissions by Julia Phillips and Faheem Majeed, and the High Line Channel exhibition Spiritual Technology, featuring short films by Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ursula Mayer, and Suzanne Treister.
Julia Phillips: Observer, Observed
Through August 2023
On the High Line at 26th Street
For Observer, Observed, Julia Phillips crafts a custom shape set of binoculars, cast in bronze and attached to an adjustable metal support structure, installed on the Flyover at 26th Street. Visitors can interact with the sculpture by looking through the binoculars onto the adjacent streets and buildings—while a nearby LED screen transmits live footage of the visitor’s eyes, captured by a camera inside the binoculars. The title of the work, Observer, Observed, refers to the power dynamics at play between perception and spectatorship in public space.
Faheem Majeed: Freedom’s Stand
Through August 2023
On the High Line at 30th Street
Faheem Majeed presents Freedom’s Stand, an homage to the role of Black newspapers in the US. The walls of the sculpture showcase headlines, articles, photographs, and advertisements from historical and contemporary Black newspapers, such as the ongoing South Shore Current in Chicago; these selections rotate monthly. Freedom’s Stand is named after Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned-and-operated newspaper in New York City, founded in 1827. The work draws inspiration from a range of influential, community-driven work, and emphasizes the importance of community-generated news and self-representation.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ursula Mayer, Suzanne Treister: Spiritual Technology
November 10, 2022–January 4, 2023
On the High Line at 14th Street
Screens daily beginning at 6pm
Spiritual Technology features three films by different artists exploring how relations between spirituality and technology shift over time, including links between science, myth, belief systems, and our connection to the planet. Cannupa Hanska Luger’s We Live Future Ancestral Technologies Entry Log is an Indigenous science fiction film that describes a mass exodus from earth by those who destroyed much of it and those remaining behind to repair it. Ursula Mayer’s Atom Spirit is also set in the near future, one of increasing biomedical innovations, that follows a group of evolutionary geneticists creating a cryogenically frozen arc of DNA from all forms of life. Meanwhile, Suzanne Treister’s HFT The Gardener tells the story of a stock trader who experiments with various hallucinogenic states while watching high-frequency algorithmic trading graph patterns.
