Moving Image Commissions by Uri Aran and Shahryar Nashat

The Walker Art Center is excited to announce two new Moving Image Commissions as part of its ongoing series of artist commissions made to premiere online and subsequently accesible onsite via the Walker Mediatheque.

Walker Moving Image commissioned Uri Aran, an Israeli artist based in New York, and Shahryar Nashat, a Swiss artist based in Los Angeles, to create two new works that will launch online February 18, 2016. Premiering for free on the Walker website for a limited run of one month, the invitation to make both works were made with an awareness to the inquiry, inspiration, and influence of Marcel Broodthaers, a signature artist within the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Both commissions will stream online from the Moving Image Commissions page and are accompanied by essays from Isla Leaver-Yap, Bentson Moving Image Scholar at the Walker.

The Walker Moving Image Commissions were initiated in May 2015 with premieres of work by Moyra Davey and James Richards that focused on artist Derek Jarman. The first season of the Moving Image Commissions will close with a new work by artist Leslie Thornton that will acknowledge the legacy of Bruce Conner within the Walker’s collections. Responding directly to Bruce Conner’s Crossroads, Thornton’s commission works with an awareness of both her and Conner’s complex inquiry into appropriated material and the aesthetics of new technologies. This commission will go online April 8.

Walker Premiere Commissions

Two Things About Suffering by Uri Aran (2016, video, 16 minutes)
Uri Aran’s new film works with the artist’s recent performance documentation as if it were found footage, manipulating his large cache of video material to create a new technical vocabulary replete with recursive loops, an operatic score, and improvised “outtakes.” Teetering between melancholia and slapstick comedy, Two Things About Suffering recalls the influence of Marcel Broodthaers’ short films and their absurdist attempts to perform the moment before language.

Aran’s practice explores the discord and substitutions that occur between meaning and memory. Working both in installation and video, his meticulous and intimate assemblages—which often include found objects, appropriated narratives, and customized display structures—lay bare the idiosyncratic systems of personal and cultural knowledge.

Present Sore by Shahryar Nashat (2016, video, 9 minutes)
Shahryar Nashat’s new video is a composite portrait of the 21st-century body—a synthetic form whose sensuality is mediated by substances both organic and man-made: clothes, prosthetic technologies, pharmaceuticals, and money. Recalling Marcel Broodthaers’ ongoing inquiry into the use of the term “figure” (which Broodthaers would simply abbreviate to the indexical “fig.”), Present Sore combines rapid editing techniques, a discordant soundtrack composed of myriad digitized sources, and a host of bodies presented in 9:16 format—the now ubiquitous portrait format for all handheld devices.

Nashat’s sculptures, installations, and videos examine ways the human body interacts with and is represented through material culture. Often focusing on the increasingly coalescing relationship between emerging technologies and the human senses, Nashat’s work seeks to expose the dependencies of the contemporary body. 

Funding
Major support to present the Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection and the Walker Moving Image Commissions is generously provided by the Bentson Foundation.