ALEXANDRA PIRICI: CO-NATURAL

CO-NATURAL – solo exhibition-performance by ALEXANDRA PIRICI

February 6 – April 15, 2018 

NEW MUSEUM’s South Galleries, Ground Floor

235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/alexandra-pirici

Alexandra Pirici uses sculpture, performance, and choreography to address symbolic manifestations of history through frameworks that define bodily presence in both real and virtual space.

“CO-NATURAL” (2018) – her new project, conceived especially for the New Museum’s South Galleries – is an ongoing action with live performers and a holographic image. The work considers the increasing fragmentation of presence and self, enabled by digital technologies, financialization, and, more broadly, by modernity’s division of nature from culture, body from mind or spirit, and individual from collective. “Co-natural” attempts to enact a dispersion of bodily presence, commenting on contemporary processes of abstraction that separate sign from substance and image from material support. Yet the work also mines this fragmentation for its potential to create a different idea of the self, one distributed across time, space, bodies, history, and memory.

This new work continues Alexandra Pirici’s recent interrogations of the collective body through choreography that links different temporal and spatial events in real time. Exploring memorials and monuments; artworks and objects in museum collections, lost, or stored in freeports; as well as abstractions of the living subject into quantifiable, monetizable data – through physical bodies, voice, and ghostly images – the work resituates them in new relations and entanglements. Pirici contextualizes the hologram, a fragment of a “whole,” through live action; the hologram becomes a mediator of presence, revealing the ways in which images and living bodies influence each other. “Co-natural” proposes a single, modular organism made of both living and digital matter that gradually assembles and disperses again over the course of each day of the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Associate Curator, and will be on view in the New Museum’s recently inaugurated South Galleries, a space designated for premiering new productions at the Museum. The South Galleries preserve the character of the building’s loft spaces, where many artists historically worked and exhibited.

“Alexandra Pirici: Co-natural” is performed by Juli Brandano, Farid Fairuz, Paula Gherghe, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Jordan Isadore, and Jennifer Tchiakpe.
Light, set, and holographic display design: Andrei Dinu
Holographic Pepper’s Ghost display: Archi3D Limited
Director of photography: Barbu Balasoiu

Alexandra Pirici (b. 1982) lives and works in Bucharest, Romania. Her work has recently been presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2017); Skulptur Projekte Münster (2017); the Berlin Biennial (2016); Tate Modern, London, and Tate Liverpool (2016); OFF-Biennale Budapest (2015); the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2015); Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2014); and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2014). In collaboration with artist Manuel Pelmuş, she represented Romania at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). In 2015, she received the Excellence Award of the National Dance Center, Bucharest.

“Alexandra Pirici: Co-natural” is organized by the New Museum. The project was made possible through the generous lead support of the European ArtEast Foundation and Art Encounters and also with support from the Toby Devan Lewis Emerging Artists Exhibitions Fund and the Artemis Council of the New Museum. The exhibition is realized in collaboration with the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels. Special thanks to CINETic and The National Dance Center Bucharest.