New Museum Presents Upcoming Season's Exhibition Schedule

New Museum announced their upcoming exhibition schedule for the 2016-2017 season, which includes Pipilotti Rist, Cheng Ran, My Barbarian, Raymond Pettibon, and A.K. Burns.

Over the past thirty years, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs) has achieved international renown as a pioneer of video art and multimedia installations. Her mesmerizing works envelop viewers in sensual, vibrantly colored kaleidoscopic projections that fuse the natural world with the technological sublime. Referring to her art as a "glorification of the wonder of evolution," Rist maintains a deep sense of curiosity that pervades her explorations of physical and psychological experiences. Her works bring viewers into unexpected, all-consuming encounters with the textures, forms, and functions of the living universe around us. Occupying the three main floors of the New Museum, the exhibition will be the most comprehensive presentation of Rist's work in New York to date.

"Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest" will include work spanning the artist's entire career, from her early single-channel videos from the 1980s, which explore the representation of the female body in popular culture, to her recent expansive video installations that transform architectural spaces into massive dreamlike environments, enhanced by hypnotic musical scores. Featuring a new installation created specifically for this presentation, this exhibition will also reveal connections between the development of Rist's art and the evolution of contemporary technologies. Moving from the television monitor to the cinema screen, and from the intimacy of the smartphone to the communal consumption of images and soundscapes, this survey will chart the ways in which Rist's work has fused the biological with the electronic in the ecstasy of communication. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director; Margot Norton, Associate Curator; and Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator.

This summer, the New Museum and the K11 Art Foundation (KAF) announced a new partnership to support a residency and exhibition program for young Chinese artists. Cheng Ran is working in residence at the Museum's adjacent 231 Bowery studio space from August to October 2016, with his exhibition opening to the public on October 19. Though his work has been exhibited internationally, the New Museum show will be the artist's first US solo exhibition and the result of his first visit to the United States. Born in Inner Mongolia in 1981, Cheng Ran studied at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and started working with renowned Chinese filmmaker Yang Fudong in 2004. Since 2005, Cheng Ran has been producing film and video works for which he draws widely from Western and Chinese literature, poetry, cinema, and visual culture, creating new fictive narratives based on myths and historical events.

His most recent film, In Course Of The Miraculous (2015), is an epic nine-hour work about three real-life stories of journeys that involved mysterious disappearances-including British mountaineer George Mallory, who went missing on his way to the top of Mount Everest in 1924; artist Bas Jan Ader, who vanished during his 1975 journey across the Atlantic; and the Chinese trawler Lu Rong Yu 2682, which returned to land with only one third of its crew in 2011. The work was produced by the K11 Art Foundation and premiered at the 14th Istanbul Biennial last year. For his exhibition at the New Museum, Cheng Ran will present a new multi-video installation in the Lobby Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Assistant Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director.

Working at the intersection of theater, visual arts, and critical practice, the collective My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) uses performance to theatricalize past and present problems and imagine ways of being together. The group's New Museum exhibition and residency are organized as part of the Department of Education and Public Engagement's R&D Season: DEMOCRACY. The exhibition illustrates the history and international tour of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), an eight-year project first initiated at the New Museum in 2008. For "The Audience is Always Right," My Barbarian presents an installation documenting the PoLAAT's various performances and many participants-professional and amateur alike-by means of an archive of ephemera and props, a sixty-minute single-channel video, and a large-scale mural that nods to strategies utilized by the visionary Chicano art collective Asco. The residency also includes a series of workshops, performances, and public programs. This exhibition is curated by Johanna Burton, Keith Haring Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement; Travis Chamberlain, Associate Curator of Performance and Manager of Public Programs; and Sara O'Keeffe, Assistant Curator. MORE

Since the late 1960s, Raymond Pettibon (b. 1957, Tucson, AZ) has been chronicling the history, mythology, and culture of America with a prodigious and distinctive voice. Through his drawings' signature interplay between image and text, he moves between historical reflection, emotional longing, poetic wit, and strident critique. He has produced thousands of drawings and energetic installations that have been executed in museums and galleries around the world. These works poignantly evoke the country's shifting values over time, from the idealistic postwar period in which the artist was born to the collapse of American counterculture in the '70s and '80s to the painful military and social conflicts of the present. Although Pettibon is unquestionably a pivotal figure of American art since the 1990s, he has never before had a major museum survey exhibition in New York. "Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work" at the New Museum will be the largest presentation of Pettibon's work to date, featuring more than 700 drawings from the 1960s to the present. It will also include a number of his early self-produced zines and artist's books, as well as several videos made in collaboration with fellow artists and his musician friends. This unique collection of objects and distinctly immersive installations will provide insight into the mind of one of the most influential and visionary living American artists. The exhibition is curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator, and Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director.

A.K. Burns will be the artist-in-residence through the Department of Education and Public Engagement's Spring R&D Season. Using science fiction as a point of departure, Burns is currently developing a cycle of works and installations that draws on theater, Surrealism, philosophy, and ecological anxieties. The work is serial and organized around five elements: power (the sun), water, land, body, and the void. The larger project reorients the audience within a speculative present. A Smeary Spot (2015), the opening episode, was shot both in the desert and a black box theater; it serves as an introduction into a parallel cosmology where aspects move or flow, are controlled, measured, used, or cared for, raising larger questions about how value is allocated and perceived. In a forthcoming commission for the New Museum, Burns will continue this series, staging an in-progress, video-based installation that reworks the subject-and thereby subjugation-of the "body."