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  • Frantic: Sprüth Magers’ Re’Search Wait’S exhibition

Art

Frantic: Sprüth Magers’ Re’Search Wait’S exhibition

REVIEW! It's your last chance to see Ryan Trecartin's "Re’Search Wait’S" through Feb 29 at Mitte's Sprüth Magers. Tragicomic video art for an Orwellian age!

Image for Frantic: Sprüth Magers' Re’Search Wait’S exhibition

Photo by Ryan Trecartin. Catch Re’Search Wait’S at Sprüth Magers, Mitte, through Dec 21.

Since his 2004 breakthrough American artist Ryan Trecartin’s output has included sculpture and installation, but it’s his frantic lo-fi videos he’s best known for. Often starring the artist, characters caked in bizarre make-up and costumes create a cacophony of colour and sound that have come to set the tone for post-internet video art. In this exhibition, seven films on loop are projected onto the four walls of a room with sofas and headphones arranged in the middle. The narrative is hard to follow, which perfectly reflects con­temporary technology’s confusing and constant onslaught of visual and audio stimuli. In one film Trecartin postures like an early 2000s Paris Hilton in The Simple Life: fake tan smeared on his face, preening his long wig, he muses in a pronounced Californian Valley Girl drawl through a vocoder effect “this is about meeeee and my choicehs”. The videos here are not so much comic as tragicomic, predicting the Orwellian age of the Kardashians and Big Data we now live in.

Re’Search Wait’S | Sprüth Magers, Mitte. Through Feb 29.