Living Things: Artists and their Objects of Affection, 2022-2023

San Francisco Arts Education Project
at Minnesota Street Project

The objects on display are chosen by their owners: 38 prominent local artists, many of whom have worked as Artist Mentors with SFArtsED and are or have been part of this artistic community. Shown alongside original artworks is a selection of personal items, each extracted from an artist’s home or studio, all unique glimpses into their creative lives and ways of perceiving the world. 

While some things on view draw a direct relationship to a specific artwork, others are treasures in which the artist finds comfort, inspiration and unique value. From the mundane and ordinary to the sentimental and idiosyncratic, the objects that artists collect on their artistic journeys hold memories and tell stories. What is it about the life of an object that calls one to cherish and keep it?

Artists: Ramon Abad, Seyed Alavi, Alexis Arnold, Chester Arnold, Agelio Batle, Libby Black, Melissa Bolger, Lenka Clayton, Frank D. Cole, Paz de la Calzada, Veronica de Jesus, Dennis Gallagher, Zoe Farmer, Vivienne Flesher, Renée Gertler, Lauren Hartman, Taraneh Hemami, Valerie Hersey, Harriet Heyman, Colter Jacobsen, Prajakti Jayavant, Lynn Marie Kirby, Rachel Major, Joe Melamed, Yvonne Mouser, Abner Nolan, Tiersa Nureyev, Richard Olsen, Erik Parra, Carissa Potter, J. John Priola, Byron Ryono, Ward Schumaker, Lily Simonson, Charlene Tan, Josephine Taylor, Amber Jean Young, Wanxin Zhang

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The Electric Comma, 2017

V–A–C Foundation, Palazzo delle Zaterre, Venice.

Borrowing its title from Shannon Ebner’s installation The Electric Comma, this exhibition focuses on changes in language, perception, and understanding in the age of artificial intelligence. Through varied practices and from different backgrounds, participating artists deal with the negotiations between the conscious mind and the currently pervasive learning machine. The works in the exhibition imagine numerous possible pathways of exchange between human and nonhuman, ranging from the poetic and intuitive to the algorithmic and analytical. This exhibition is co-curated by Pete Belkin and Katerina Chuchalina

Artists: Erick Beltrán, Alighiero Boetti, Mircea Cantor, Nicolás Consuegra, Anthony Discenza, Shannon Ebner, Valentin Fetisov, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Piero Golia, Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries, Daniel Keller, Daria Martin, Pedro Neves Marques, Jonathan Monk, Trevor Paglen, Bridget Riley, Andrey Shental, Dayanita Singh, Cheyney Thompson, Urban Fauna Lab

Produced by V-A-C Foundation in dialogue with KADIST. Palazzo delle Zaterre Venice, Italy. 25 NOV 2017–28 APR 2018.  LEARN MORE

Arseny Zhilyaev: Polite Guests from the Future, 2014

KADIST, San Francisco

M.I.R.: Polite Guests from the Future is the first solo exhibition in the U.S. by Moscow-based artist, Arseniy Zhilyaev. Implementing the museum as a medium, Zhilyaev models his approach after the “negative display” exhibitions of A. Fedorov-Davydov, a Soviet art historian who disregarded the authenticity and centrality of the museological object in favor of depicting social processes. The second chapter of an ongoing investigation initiated at Kadist, Paris, this iteration of the imaginary Museum of Russian History (M.I.R.) focuses on outer space conquests under the flag of the “Russian Cosmic Federation.” For the exhibition, Zhilyaev critiques the political climate of Russia with a revisionist and speculative eye, tracing the nation’s intergalactic achievements—from their origins in the “polite politics” of the early 21st century, to the future space militia, charged to defend the Tarantula Nebula RC? 0021. Read about this project here

Public Program: The Authoritarian Body: Performing Politicians, Pressure Points on the Body Politic, by L.M.Bogad

Sara Eliassen: A Blank Slate

screening + conversation with Laetitia Sonami

Based in Oslo, Norwegian artist and conceptual filmmaker Sara Eliassen often returns to questions of self in relation to the audience’s gaze as typically positioned in society. She uproots expectations of narrative structures in cinema, with use of iconic cinematic moments as departure points for her investigations of the viewer-character dynamics and of collective memory in film.

A performance by Laetitia Sonami acts as a prequel to the screening of A Blank Slate. A key collaborator on the sound concept and design for the film, Sonami lives in Oakland and works in sound, installation and performance. With skilful command of her environment and an insatiable sense of play, she guides the audience to hear with her the hidden world beyond our reach. Through invented tools and manipulations of old and new media, Sonami’s visceral live acts unearth found audio landscapes previously unnoticed by our conditioned ear. 

A conversation with Alexey Buldakov of Urban Fauna Lab

Kadist hosts Alexey Buldakov of Urban Fauna Lab after spending several months with us in San Francisco to develop a new artwork, Misting Miner. This active sculpture materializes the invisible phenomenon of mining cryptocurrency. The excess heat produced by the machinery as it performs this process is a latent and untapped source of energy. As such, the artist seeks to harness that energy and reveal its transformative potential by turning it into fog through the water cooling system inside it, which he reroutes to follow a cycle of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

The Best Manifesto is the Unwritten One, with Tony Labat and Hans Winkler

A participatory celebration in honor of Kazemir Malevich’s 135th birthday (among other things) with artists Hans Winkler and Tony Labat. “People would say, ‘Well, what are you celebrating?’ because it was blank. And we would say, ‘What would you like to celebrate?'”