DIS,

New Museum Triennial: Surround Audience

25 February 2015 — 24 May 2015

New Museum, New York

A signature initiative of the New Museum, the Triennial is the only recurring international exhibition in New York City devoted to early-career artists from around the world. The Triennial’s predictive, rather than retrospective, model embodies the institution’s thirty-seven-year commitment to exploring the future of culture through the art of today. This third iteration of the Triennial is titled “Surround Audience” and is co-curated by New Museum Curator Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan Trecartin. “Surround Audience” explores the effects of an increasingly connected world both on our sense of self and identity as well as on art’s form and larger social role. The exhibition looks at our immediate present, a time when culture has become more porous and encompassing and new considerations about art’s role and potential are surfacing. Artists are responding to these evolving conditions in a number of ways, from calculated appropriations to critical interrogations to surreal or poetic statements.

For the Triennial, DIS presents The Island.

A woman lays in wet khaki’s on a thick slab of marble as the programmed choreography of six WATER BARSTM rain down. Underneath her long hair, soaking khakis, and wet ballet flats is a kitchen island, the smell of butter emanating from the electric oven. The fitting of two perfect worlds. Pause. Sleep Mode.

The Island is a prototype and a showroom, it's also a space for something to happen — from a philosopher making a salad to a lifestyle guru doing ASMR. The Island is a brand new product, a hybrid of the (social) kitchen and the (private) bath, as natural domestic partners. It's a 'state of the art' smart island, but it also teaches. Aside from product demonstrations, the kitchen holds talks on smartification, digital consciousness, art's economic system, and cooking lessons.

The Island is a complex network of industrial infrastructures and natural resources — electrical grids, gas networks, water systems, data clouds, and the food chain. The Island illuminates humanity’s deanimation of the earth in order to reanimate our manmade fantasy.

Shower performance everyday during the opening two weeks and weekends following. Two talks/events the first week and talks every other week following.

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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