DIS, Juliana Huxtable

Art in the Age of the Internet: 1989 to Today

07 February 2018 — 30 May 2018

Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is the first major thematic group exhibition in the United States to examine the radical impact of internet culture on visual art. Featuring 60 artists, collaborations, and collectives, the exhibition is comprised of over 70 works across a variety of mediums, including painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, web-based projects, and virtual reality.

This exhibition features work of an international, intergenerational group of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, DIS, Harun Farocki, Juliana Huxtable, Mark Leckey, Trevor Paglen, Nam June Paik, Sondra Perry, Thomas Ruff, Frances Stark, and Anicka Yi.

The exhibition is divided into five sections that explore themes such as emergent ideas of the body and notions of human enhancement; the internet as a site of both surveillance and resistance; the circulation and control of images and information; the possibilities for exploring identity and community afforded by virtual domains; and new economies of visibility accelerated by social media. Throughout, the work in the exhibition addresses the internet-age democratization of culture that comprises our current moment.

The earliest work in the exhibition is from 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This development, and others that followed in quick succession, modernized the internet, and in the process radically changed our way of life―from how we access and generate information, make friends and share experiences, to how we imagine our future bodies and how nations police national security. 1989 also marked a watershed moment across the globe, with significant shifts in politics, geographies, and economies. Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and protests in Tiananmen Square signaled the beginning of our current globalized age, which cannot be imagined without the internet.

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today is organized by Eva Respini, Barbara Lee Chief Curator, with Jeffrey De Blois, Assistant Curator.

DIS

The collective DIS is exemplary in defining what Hannah Black in Artforum describes as the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life, express(ing) the despairing atomization, and the compromised longing for solidarity, of a post-bourgeois creative class hovering on the brink of its own obsolescence”.

Formed in 2010, after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and global recession, DIS as an entity has over the decade typified its aesthetic, cultural, political and economic impact. Composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Their work exists often simultaneously online and in situ, as well as more traditional mediums like photography, sculpture, video and installation. Their current multi year project dis.art is a subscriber-based online video channel popularising in “edutainment”, helping us understand the complicated social machinery of our techno-capitalist world. The channel presents new commissions with other artists as well as DIS’ own content.

In 2021, DIS co-curated the Biennial for Image Movement Geneva, featuring their latest work Everything but the World. In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything But The World presents a non-linear, natural history show about homo sapiens, linking the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers. It addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Recent solo exhibitions include, How To Become A Fossil at Secession, Vienna, Everything But The World at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Big Beat Disaster at Project Native Informant, London.

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Juliana Huxtable

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Hayward Gallery, London, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Brooklyn Museum, New York, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston, MOMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays.

Juliana Huxtable recently opened her second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, AKIMBO SPITTLE. In 2023, Juliana Huxtable opened her first European institutional solo exhibition —USSYPHILIA at Fotografiska, Berlin. —USSYPHILIA includes and premieres a video installation, the new site-specific body of work and works from the AKIMBO-SPITTLE series.

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