"GROUND ZERO"
Original Soundtrack and Sound Design by Aaron David Ross
10 years ago, in the summer of 2009, the Tamil homeland of ‘Eelam’ was wiped out by the Sri Lankan army. Born through a neo-Marxist revolution, it had been self-governed as an autonomous state for almost 30 years. However, following attacks on the United States on September 11th 2001, revolutionary movements around the world were re-labelled as terrorists, enabling their eradication. As the international community turned a blind eye, Eelam was annihilated. Curiously, in the months following that violence (and with the economic liberalisation that followed), the first white cube commercial galleries opened in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo, projecting democratic values internationally and representing a generation of artists influenced by the Western canon encountered online.
“Around the world, the juridical framework of human rights has been leveraged not only to protect the oppressed and disenfranchised but also to justify the imperial ambitions of the nation states by which human rights are enforced. Perhaps though, the problem is not with the concept of human rights but with the very category of ‘human’ itself.”
Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann at Schinkel Pavillon Berlin
Audio & Video samples available on request
YOU WASTED A GOOD CRISIS
A Good Crisis features the Night King from HBO’s Game of Thrones discussing the missed opportunity for economic revolution following the mid-2000s global financial crisis. He explains how financiers and CEOs now revel in the feudal frenzy of the “new rentership society,” a term propagated by private equity firms to explain the economic shift that has seen the renter population of the United States soar in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash.
Created by Dis
Written in collaboration with Moritz Schularick and Drew Zeiba
Directors of Photography Alex Gvojic and Rory Muhlere
Edited by Anthony Valdez
Score by Aaron David Ross
Collected by New Museum New York and Baltimore Museum of Art
TELFAR
Installation & Performance, Spazio Maiocchi Milan, 2018. Presented by Kaleidoscope
"NUDE"
Launching his eponymous line in 2005 at the age of 18, Liberian-American unisex prodigy Telfar Clemens has developed a strikingly original and democratic design vocabulary. Laying the blueprint for today’s black avant-garde, TELFAR was genderless a decade before it became a trend, launching projects with a remarkably horizontal cultural impact—from collaborations with Solange Knowles at the Guggenheim Museum to designing the nationwide uniforms for over 10,000 employees of the US fast-food chain White Castle. After winning the 2017 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund, TELFAR is poised to take its place in the foreground of America’s fashion future.
At Spazio Maiocchi, KALEIDOSCOPE presents TELFAR’s first project in Italy, Nude, a fashion presentation without a single garment, eloquent to the brand’s progressive aesthetics and artistic DNA. The exhibition centers around a 30-feet-tall nude image of the designer by photographer Rob Kulisek surrounded by ten nude and genderless sculptures designed by American artist Frank Benson and manufactured by German state-of-the-art mannequin factory Penther Formes—an updated version of the iconic mannequins presented by TELFAR in the 2016 Berlin Biennale. The show is completed by a short film about Telfar’s apartment building in Queens, New York, by filmmaker Finn MacTaggart; and a musical composition written for clapping by Aaron David Ross in collaboration with artist Ryan Trecartin.
TELFAR’s exhibition will also take over the 3x6m billboard in the courtyard of Spazio Maiocchi, and will be accompanied by a book of images by New York photographer Jason Nocito, a performance by South-African musical duo FAKA, and an exclusive limited-edition T-shirt.
Soundtracked by Aaron David Ross & Ryan Trecartin in collaboration with Telfar & Babak Radboy, featuring FAKA
KELELA "JUPITER"
Produced by Aaron David Ross, Additional Production by Nightfeelings
on ‘Take Me Apart‘, debut album from Kelela, out on Warp Records 2017
Written by Kelela + Romy Madley Croft