exhibition history
Zeesy Powers, Angus Tarnawsky, Anton Vidokle
Crutch Contemporary
Jul 07 2019
Today the Russian philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In this three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes Cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day.
In Zeesy Powers’ virtual reality work “This Could Be You” the viewer inhabits the body of an algorithmically-generated 90-year-old woman, naked and battered by the refuse of the information worker. VR is positioned as a technology of infinity: you can be anyone, anywhere, doing anything; and yet, as Zeesy reminds users, its practices are also those of confinement: where you find yourself trapped in a space limited by sensors, the length of a cable, and the limits of someone else’s imagination.
A performance by Angus Tarnawsky explores sound through an assembled orchestra of radio frequencies.
Zeesy Powers was the 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Toronto Animated Image Society, for which she produced "This Could be You," an interactive piece exploring practices of confinement in VR. Powers has been an invited observer and participant in international telecommunications and cybersecurity conferences for military-industrial, corporate and activist realms. Powers is a 2018 Chalmers Fellow, through this she continues her research into how our digital tools shape the ways we relate to ourselves and others.
Angus Tarnawsky is an Australian artist and musician. His work considers perceptions of sound and space, existing in many hybrid forms across composition, relational aesthetics, and installation. Recent exhibitions and presentations have been hosted by Pioneer Works, Fridman Gallery, Wave Farm (New York), and Het Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam/New York). Originally from Tasmania, he studied improvisation and electroacoustic music at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne before relocating to New York City in 2010.
Still from Anton Vidokle’s “Immortality For All: a film trilogy on Russian Cosmism” (2014-2017) HD video, color, sound. 96:00 duration. Russian with English subtitles.