For the Performa 19 Biennial, New York and Bangkok based artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, in collaboration with boychild, Bonaventure, Alex Gvojic, and Aaron David Ross, will present a performance in the form of an invented reality, collapsing oral storytelling and local mythologies into Thailand’s complex history with the American military, national policies and Buddhist kingship.
Based on Ghost Cinema, a post-Vietnam War ritual in Thailand where outdoor screenings function as communions between the audience and the spirits. Introduced by American soldiers stationed in Thailand who screened films in the forests, creating enigmatic projections which locals attributed to ghosts, the appropriation of the ritual by locals reflects the rich history of military coups and their effect on local folklore and rituals.
No history in a room filled with people with funny names 5
Opening with the myth of spirits summoning projectionists to initiate an outdoor film projection, artist Korakrit Arunanondchai's dynamic film is charged with the idea of community – among humans and non-humans – in Thailand’s contemporary moment of instability. Boys trapped in a cave trigger a reflection on the geopolitics of the region and the fragility of its history.
The recurring central character, a fictional Thai painter, is depicted in situations that reflect the interaction between traditional beliefs, the natural environment, and developments in the technology, politics, and culture of a changing Thailand. The sculptural installation presented in the Central Pavilion is a series of ‘post-natural’ tree-like forms, while the Arsenale hosts a three-screen installation made with Alex Gvojic (1984, USA).
Film & Installation by Korakrit Arunanondchai & Alex Gvojic
Music & Sound Design by Aaron David Ross
Featured in the 2019 Venice Biennale
natural gods
Permanent collection
de Young Museum
San Francisco
This is a nature show about the least natural thing of all: god.
By Korakrit Arunanondchai
Music by Aaron David Ross
for Dis.art
Permanent collection
de Young Museum
San Francisco
M.Y.R.I.A.D.
Oneothrix Point Never's live ensemble featuring
Daniel Lopatin, Kelly Moran, Eli Keszler & Aaron David Ross
Pulling from long-standing fascinations with film and television tropes, abstract sculpture, game ephemera, poetry, apocryphic histories, internet esoterica, and philosophies of being, MYRIAD generates a conceptual spectrum that is as much a speculation on the unthinkable future as it is an allegory for the current disquiet of a civilization out of balance with its environment.
Released March 2019 on Concordia
Created by Lafawndah, Nick Weiss, L-vis 1990 & Aaron David Ross
ANCESTOR BOY
Lafawndah’s journey to her current incarnation as a devotional pop polymath has wound as unpredictably as her compositional style. Her traversing of musical and artistic milieus has been defined by a freedom of tone, surrealist sense of space, and assured manipulation of formal and psychological tension.
The SoulMates Archive™ is an ever-expanding collection of songs uncovered through the travels of Adaron and Nico; a gecko and corgi whose friendship and fanaticism guide them across the cosmos. After developing BassGas™, a subwoofer-powered form of renewable fuel, the friends find themselves in frictionless perpetual motion; scouring the most remote corners of the galaxy for rare artifacts in the form of lossless MP3s. The Soulmates Archive™ represents the first time these relics are distributed for public consumption, now offering earth-based lifeforms the choicest editions in the pantheon for their streaming pleasure.
SOULMATES
COMPATIBILITY EP
DIS.ART
watch on
GENRE NON CONFORMING
The DIS Edutainment Network
Presented by the New York-based collective DIS, Genre-Nonconforming: The DIS Edutainment Network, (“The DIS Network”) is the first exhibition coinciding with the launch of dis.art, a new streaming platform for entertainment and education. The DIS Network reveals a “DIS-topian” take on the future of education—decentralized and open-access, yet communal and physically connected, inviting visitors to experience a twisted hybrid of entertainment and education. Played on a continuous loop on 36 large LED screens in the de Young’s atrium, the work is the result of collaboration with a group of international theorists, writers, and artists including Korakrit Arunanondchai, Darren Bader, Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen, CUSS Group, Aria Dean, Casey Jane Ellison, Ilana Harris-Babou, Ada O’Higgins, Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller, Ian Isiah, Chus Martinez, Babak Radboy, Christopher Kulendran Thomas in collaboration with Annika Kuhlmann, Ryan Trecartin, Amalia Ulman, McKenzie Wark, and Women’s History Museum with Jack Scanlan. Many of the videos feature music and sound design created by Dis-affiliated composer Aaron David Ross.
Dis.art exhibition at the DeYoung Art Museum in San Fransisco, CA.
Developed in relative secrecy over the past five years, CULTURESPORT is an animated science fiction web series set inside a sprawling fictional universe—the result of intensive and ongoing collaboration between artists, designers, musicians, actors, dancers, brands, and CULTURESPORT’s in-house creative team.
Music & sound design by Aaron David Ross, Joe Kubler, Jake Merrick, Javier Morales & Rotterdam Terror Corps
Arranged, Mixed & Mastered by Aaron David Ross
CULTURESPORT
ROTTERDAM 1995
Runway original soundtrack by Gatekeeper
CORPORATIVO
luar
FW 2018
In Raul Lopez’s Corporate America, Men Wear Skirts and Dresses to the Office"
- Vogue
"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
BUFFER
By Xavier Cha
Opera, Dance & Theatre work commissioned by BAM
2017 Next Wave Festival & Performa 2017
Xavier Cha’s perception-altering new work lays bare the intimate yet alienated relationships we have with the bodies on our screens.
Music and sound design by Aaron David Ross
Libretto by Juliana Huxtable
Stage design by Paul Kopkau, Felix Burrichter, and Michael Bullock
Costume design by Avena Gallagher