Jordan Wolfson: (Female Figure) 2014 / 14 Rooms

Jordan Wolfson’s piece (Female Figure) 2014 is an animatronic robot that dances in front of a large mirror, while at the same time seeking eye contact with the spectator. Jordan Wolfson’s work has been chosen by the curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach as an epilogue to the Live Art exhibition 14 Rooms, which ran concurrently to this year’s Art Basel art fair in Basel (Switzerland).

14 Rooms was presented by Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, and Theater Basel. The curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist invited fourteen international artists to each activate a room, exploring the relationship between space, time, and physicality with an artwork whose “material” is the human being. Jordan Wolfson’s kinetic piece (Female Figure) 2014 is not performed by human beings, but a robot, and can be seen as a look into the future. This video shows a part of the robot’s performance.

Jordan Wolfson was born in 1980 in New York. He works in a variety of media, such as installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Jordan Wolfson lives in New York and Los Angeles.

Jordan Wolfson: (Female Figure) 2014. 14 Rooms Live Art Exhibition. Messe Basel, Basel (Switzerland), June 13, 2014.

More videos covering 14 Rooms.

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Complete video (6:07 min.):

From the press text:

An animatronic dancer moves lasciviously in front of a large mirror. She tries to catch the eye of the spectator while at the same time watching itself, much in the way that viewers are confronted with their own mirror images.

Jordan Wolfson belongs to a younger generation of artists whose work cannot be ascribed to any one specific medium. The artist works with installation, video, sculpture, and performance. His interests are situated within a larger discussion about the contemporary human condition and how we define ourselves within an environment that resists such definitions. An important point of departure for Wolfson’s work is technology, which the artist implements less as a means of generating cold machines with purely utilitarian applications and more as a way of creating new “contemporary” characters. Born from a world dominated by communication, advertising, and marketing, these figures are developed in narratives that forcefully convey the artist’s view and that address how we portray ourselves.

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