Doug Aitken
2021Sleepwalkers
Doug Aitken
Donald Sutherland, Tilda Swinton
A bike messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a business man and an office worker make their way through an evening in New York City. A collection of eight large-scale moving images projected on the walls of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Sleepwalkers
Blow Debris
Doug Aitken
Anna Getty, Christian Camargo
Blow Debris similarly suggests narrative but prefers to offer it in the form of a drifting, almost aimless experience; the piece enacts a passage or journey as we follow a group of nude wanderers in a desert landscape. As with Electric Earth, what could be postmodern anomie becomes celebratory drifting. Aitken spurns a romantic nostalgia for a pristine past and its untrammeled landscapes in favor of the stories suggested by the discarded remnants and detritus that litter the expanse of the Mojave Desert. He also fetishizes the feeling of the desert. Even in the cool, dark space of the gallery rooms housing the huge projections, you sense the lassitude of the characters and time seems to slow down. And then things explode, time reverses, and you are compelled to walk around some more, from dislocation to relocation and back again.
Blow Debris
Station to Station
Doug Aitken
Sending a burning arrow into the stunting effects that the compartmentalization of culture has on how creativity manifests, visual artist Doug Aitken embarked on an experiment exploring a less materialistic and more nomadic direction of art creation, exhibition, and participation. Station to Station involved a train that crossed North America housing a constantly changing creative community including artists, musicians, and curators, who collaborated in the creation of recordings, artworks, films, and 10 unique happenings, across the country.
Station to Station
Autumn
Doug Aitken
Chloë Sevigny
Aitken wanted to create three music videos, each with their own narrative, to be aired separately at different times as part of his commercial production. The resulting video, shown in galleries, fuses together the three separate narratives in a non-linear fashion. Located on the precipice between the oft-thought mutually exclusive realms of art and entertainment, Autumn stands as an emblematic example of Aitken's video practice, investigating the cultural numbness generated by the flow of media images.
Autumn
The Art of Time
Fergus Daly, Katherine Waugh
Sylvère Lotringer, Vito Acconci
Explores some of the most innovative attempts by contemporary artists, filmmakers, architects etc to explore multiple Temporalities and to counter the uniform sense of time promoted by our technology-driven society.
The Art of Time
Electric Earth
Doug Aitken
In Doug Aitken’s cinemascope-like, walk-in, multi-sectioned, video installation, the public is transported into the atmosphere of an airport by night. A flaming car and an abandoned shopping cart compliment the eerie scenario while, in a parallel world, a noiseless, black rapper sashays through an urban landscape.
Electric Earth
Migration
Doug Aitken
The images in migration (empire) are underscored by the constant sound of running or dripping water. Aitken portrays the wild animals in the sterility of the motel rooms as sublime creatures in a diffuse, bright light. Their fur, feathers or eyes are shown in detailed close-ups. In migration (empire) a dynamic is generated that is at once meditative and powerful – and utterly entrancing. Language(s)
Migration
