The project Affective Territories, Alternate Belongings will include a physical exhibition, a series of online screenings on our BROADCAST program, and the publication of articles on our ONE WORK program that will provide critical context to the works included in the project.

Affective Territories, Alternate Belongings showcases video artworks from contemporary national and international artists whose current video production practice highlights technology as an extension of humankind and its desire to transcend corporeal identity.

The introduction of digital technologies and the rise of artificial intelligence have altered our understanding of belonging to a physical world and opened ways of existing in a new transhuman one. Belonging is no longer conflated with a place, a culture, or a generation. Rather, it widens to include questions of what constitutes the human/non-human through our correspondence to objects and other species and the relationship between our digital avatars and our visceral, embodied experiences.

Many of the works in this project challenge this reality by presenting solitary humans, computer-generated characters, or humans acting as video game protagonists, often all facing a hostile or alien environment. They ask us to slow down, urging us to explore the increasingly entangled, unbodied, and corporeal worlds we take turns inhabiting so we can create new territories of belonging and develop alternate affections.

Project is co-created by our 2023/24 Curatorial Fellow, Prima Jalichandra- Sakuntabhai, and our 4th-WALL program manager, Pedro Inock.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

Allyson Packer and Jesse Fisher / United States

Allyson Packer and Jesse Fisher collaborate on experimental videos that employ emergent forms of image-making to explore the impact of evolving technologies. Their work has screened internationally at multiple venues, including ADA X in Montreal, the Ostrale Biennial in Dresden, Weltkunstzimmer in Dusseldorf, and DIS.art.

Allyson Packer is an artist whose work considers the relationship between mystery and human progress. Her videos and installations have been presented at Nahmad Projects (London), The University of Barcelona, The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), and Hošek Contemporary (Berlin), as well as published in the Centre Pompidou's Journal de l’Université d’été de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky. In 2022, she was a La Box Artist in Residence at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art in Bourges, France, where she authored the publication SPECTRE and completed the public artwork C RY, commissioned by the Artichoke Trust in London. Packer lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Visual Arts & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. She is represented by birds + Richard in Berlin.

Jesse Fisher is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating with a degree in Film & Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he apprenticed at Rock Paper Scissors, one of the world’s premier editing companies. In 2017, he directed, produced, and edited the award-winning documentary Una Nueva Tierra (A New Land). His work has screened at the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Cucalorus Film Festival, and Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.

Camille Dumont/ Switzerland

Camille Dumont is an artist and filmmaker based in Geneva (CH.) Her practice centers on questioning relationships to territory, the notion of work, and contemporary Western relations to the circulation of cultural objects. Her documentary essays and short films navigate between cultural referential through writing and autobiographical experience. Her work has been shown in Switzerland and internationally, and she has won several awards in Switzerland since 2015. She has completed residencies at Mains d'Œuvres (Paris, 2016), Triangle Astérides (Marseille, 2017), Atelier Berlin FCAC (Germany, 2019), and Le Cube - independant art room (Rabat, 2020).

Chrystele Nicot & Antoine Alesandrini / France

French artists Chrystele Nicot and Antoine Alesandrini (1989 and 1985) studied at the Beaux-Arts De Paris and ESRA. Since 2017, they have collaborated actively on various projects in France and abroad, developing a hybrid practice between film and sculpture, often merging into interactive pieces. Nicot's and Alesandrini's work has been shown in contemporary art venues such as Fondation d'Entreprise Ricardand and the Salon de Montrouge. Their films were presented at the Série Mania, Côté Court, and Fid Marseille festivals. They are currently conducting research in Normandy based on forms of autonomies and peasantry in relation to digital technologies.

Holly Veselka / United States

Holly Veselka is a new media artist who uses emerging technologies to address the contemporary challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change. She generates video artworks, sculptural installations, and printed photographic representations by integrating technologies such as photogrammetry, simulation software, and AI. Technology assumes multiple roles throughout her process—as tool, subject, and narrator.

Holly Veselka’s artworks and exhibitions have been presented at notable venues including Wave Hill (NYC), Cuchifritos (NYC), the Nars Foundation (NYC), ShetlandArts (UK), Lage Egal (Berlin), ArtPace (San Antonio), Lawndale (Houston), ACRE Projects (Chicago), SedimentARTS (Richmond), and The Southern (Charleston). She has participated in artist residencies and fellowships through organizations such as the Jaaga Foundation (Bangalore), the Mammal Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences in the Białowieza Forest (Poland), Lawndale (Houston), and the LES Studio Program (NYC). She has received awards, including a Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Artist Grant and a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant.

Joe Harjo / Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma

Joe Harjo is currently working and teaching in San Antonio, TX. He holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Central Oklahoma and an MFA from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

His work uncovers the lack of visibility of Native culture, lived experience and identity in America, due to both the absence of proper representation in mainstream culture and the undermining of Native belief systems. He confronts the misrepresentation and appropriation of Native culture and identity, initiating a call for change.

Recent exhibitions include: Indian Removal Act II: And She Was, The Contemporary at Blue Star, San Antonio, TX; FotoFest Biennial 2024: Critical Geography, Silver Street Studios, Houston, TX; Death Rights, Curated by Marian Casey, APEX Art NYC, San Antonio, TX; Indian Removal Act I: American Progress, Galveston Arts Center, Galveston, TX; Look Now What I’ve Become, Artpace Mainspace, San Antonio TX; Mutable Land, Nars Foundation Satellite Exhibition, Governor’s Island, New York, NY; High Visibility: On Location in Rural America and Indian Country, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND; The Only Certain Way, Sala Diaz, San Antonio, TX; Texas, We’re Listening, Brownsville Museum of Art, Brownsville, TX; We’re Still Here: Native American Artists Then and Now, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX.

Harjo has been selected for a Summer 2024 residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, and is a 2022 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Resident Alumni, a 2020- 2021 Harpo Foundation Native American Residency Fellow, and a 2023 Contemporary at Blue Star Berlin Resident Alumni hosted by Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Germany. His work has recently been acquired by the San Antonio Museum of Art and Texas A&M University at San Antonio.

Laine Rettmer / United States

Laine Rettmer is a video artist and opera director whose work has been presented in museums, galleries, theaters, film festivals, academic institutions, concert venues, barns, fields, and the occasional bar. Their work reinterprets and investigates history, mythology, storytelling, and notions of a Western utopia by imagining new interventions or concentric and non-linear narratives. Venues include the Vizcaya Museum; Manifesta; MoMA Public, curated by Mel Logan and Jakob Boeskov; the Museum of Fine Art, Boston; CreaTures Festival, Seville, Spain; MassArt, Brant Gallery, Boston, MA; Silvermine Gallery, Connecticut, CT; Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology Museum for the exhibition, Hot Steam; the Illuminus Festival; the Yuan Art Museum; Yve Yang Gallery; Perkins and Ping; Present Company; NADA NY, NADA Presents; and AREA gallery, among others. Recent awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a Warhol Foundation Grant, and multiple MAP Fund grants for Standby Snow: Chronicles of a Heat Wave and the multimedia opera Ellis, constructed from first-person accounts of immigration to the US. Rettmer has been an Invited Artist in Residence at MassArt in Boston, Vermont Studio Center, Skaftfell Center for Visual Arts in Iceland, and Robert Wilson's Watermill Foundation on Long Island.

Rettmer currently serves as the Graduate Program Director of the Photography Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Margaret Noble / United States

Born in Texas and raised in California, Margaret Noble’s experimental artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her interdisciplinary work resides at the intersection of sound, sculpture, and performance. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego, and an MFA in Sound Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noble’s work is influenced by the dynamic dance music cultures of southern California, which flourished from the 1980s to the 1990s and later led her to perform as an electronic music DJ in the underground club community of Chicago. In 2004, she branched out from the dance floor into experimental sound art for new audiences, intersecting the electronic sound scene and visual arts community. During this transition, Margaret created sound works for video, dance, and object theater collaborative projects. Her interdisciplinary artworks have evolved into interactive sculptures and installations investigating technology, psychology, and environmentalism.

Paul Moore / Northern Ireland

Moore’s work explores ideas of the journey - both to and from nations, across borders, and through technology. Co-location resonates throughout his practice. He regularly returns to explorations of motion: the push-pull of physical and immaterial boundaries, exertion, labor, and effort. He works in sonic/electronic (audio/visual) installation and performance, operating within the field and gathering bodies of ephemeral and ambient sounds and images, particularly whilst in motion.

Moore’s practice has developed through durational performance video work informed by VR and the phenomenology of endurance exercise: the body and the landscape, nature and machine, and internal and external experience. Recent research has also been embedded in a socio-historical narrative that examines the present moment through traces, expressions, recollections, and images of recent history. These start broadly through political and technological social infrastructure, narrowing to the subsequent impacts on our collective and individual identities.

Moore is based in Belfast after graduating with an MA in Art Research and Collaboration from Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. Selected shows include FIonnghlas, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast (2021) A Consideration Of All Bodies, Lab Gallery, Dublin (2021) TILT [AT WINDMILLS], CCA Derry, (2021) Unsettlement, Platform Arts Gallery, Belfast (2017), G R O U P S H O W, Golden Thread Gallery Belfast (2016). Statəcraft, Irish Museum of Modern Art Project Space, Dublin (2016), lorem ipsum, Atypical Gallery Belfast (2015) and Palace Revolution, Galveston Arts Centre, Texas U.S.A. (2014).

Scott Massey / Canada

Massey's work explores the confluence of art and science whereby he accentuates and amplifies natural phenomena, often heightened through artificial means or via slight manipulations, based on research into areas of physics, cosmology, astronomy, and other scientific disciplines. Light as a medium and image-making apparatus are fundamental aspects of his practice, employed in creating and presenting works. His image-based artworks confound normal methodologies of the media, perhaps by inverting processes or corrupting the apparatus, and his sculptural works often employ a performative or durational element that further activates the work.

Massey lives and works on Bowen Island (Nex̱ wlélex̱ m), British Columbia, Canada.

Massey holds a BFA in photography from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design (Vancouver) and has participated in residencies at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (Dawson City, YK), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Banff, AB), Dazibao/PRIM (Montreal, QC), the Lumen Collective residency in Atina, Italy. He has been awarded three production/creation grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council, as well as several other scholarships and awards.

Sophie Dia Pegrum / United States

Sophie is an interdisciplinary visual artist with a focus on film, documentary, and storytelling. She was recently awarded a Fulbright National Geographic Society Fellowship, researching, and producing a hybrid documentary/cine project about the Kyrgyz Space Program. As an accomplished cinematographer, engaging the span between artistic expression and scholarly depth, she is forging innovative paths in experimental storytelling with a deep commitment to education on documentary making, offering insight into human and cultural connections to land, sky, and creatures.

Her fellowship project on the women of the Kyrgyz Space Program encompasses a hybrid documentary - “Cosmos Dreams,” about mythmaking, sky, nomadism, and space travel, a video installation - “Envoy”, and will also result in a publication - “The Road to the Universe begins in the Village." Sophie’s years of film work include award-winning documentaries about ephemeral art/science collaborations in the Antarctic, mountain lifeways in the Himalayas, equine cultures, and semi-nomadic customs in Kyrgyzstan. She has been a recurring jury member for Kyrgyzstan’s conferences and film festivals, including Nomad: A Living Land and Nomad: An Infinite Sky.

Spencer Chang / United States

Spencer Chang (he/they) is an artist and engineer making space for alternative futures of technology as a medium for human connection, expression, and creation. Situated in a web increasingly defined by techno-solutionism, productivity optimization, hyperconsumerism, and AI replacement, their work honors the essential humanity in all computing by subverting traditional hierarchies of agency and empowering handmade computational narratives that liberate us to play and discover new ways of relating to one another through computers. Combining craft and art into “useful art”, they create environments and infrastructure that provoke our assumptions of what computers can be and offer alternative forms of digital being. Their internet environments are participatory works that evolve with the interactions of visitors, users, and maintainers.

Their work has been shown in Amsterdam, CultureHub in New York, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco and featured in Frieze and MIT Technology Review.

Woohee Cho / South Korea/ United States

Woohee Cho is a visual artist, writer, performer, and experimental filmmaker born in Seoul, South Korea and currently based in Los Angeles and Seoul. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2020) and a BFA from Seoul National University (2014). Solo exhibitions have been held at Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (2023). His artworks have been shown and screened at the Brussels Independent Film Festival, Brussel (2022); the 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor (2021); the 66th Cork International Film Festival, Ireland (2021); OUTFEST Film Festival, Los Angeles (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2020); Roy Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) (2019) among others. He has been awarded an Artist in Residence, Alex Brown Foundation, Des Moines, Iowa (2024); Visual Arts Fellowship, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul (2023); International Residency, NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (2023); Artist in Residency, The REEF residency, Los Angeles (2020-2021); Artist in Residence, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of the Art, NYC (2019); Body and Tech fellowship, The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts, Valencia (2019).

Woohee Cho's art practice is deeply informed by his experiences as a gay Korean man grappling with questions of identity and belonging. Raised in a conservative religious household, he struggled to reconcile his sexuality with societal expectations, which prompted an exploration and subversion of patriarchal, heterosexual norms in Korean culture through his artwork.