Remai Modern announces announces new web commission by Amanda Beech
Media Release: Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Remai Modern announces new web commission by Amanda Beech
Saskatoon, Canada — Remai Modern is very pleased to announce its latest web commission, This Time, by internationally celebrated artist Amanda Beech. The project will be featured on the museum’s website from February 1-28. Remai Modern web commissions are curated by Gregory Burke, Executive Director & CEO, and Sandra Guimarães, Director of Programs & Chief Curator.
This Time is a series of 10 short pop-up videos. Mimicking a video game tutorial, the work conflates a Machiavellian strategy for winning and maintaining power with contemporary curatorial diplomacy. The work interferes with access to Remai Modern’s website, but also occupies the museum by becoming an extension of its real and virtual architecture. Beech’s work questions the essence of Modernity and what it takes to recover the Modern from within a dizzyingly complex cultural and political economy, where a museum can be exchanged for a hard drive. By incorporating maps, diagrams and references to Remai Modern’s design, Beech’s videos offer wry instruction on how to be Modern today. Project credits: David Kirk (voice) and Mina Shoiab (graphics).
“With This Time, Amanda Beech essentially co-opts both Remai Modern as an institution, and the unsuspecting visitor to the home page,” said Burke. “The visitor becomes viewer, becomes gamer, with unpredictable results.”
“Beech’s work is an exciting addition to the Remai Modern web commissions,” said Guimarães. “In its questioning of how to be Modern today, this is a disruptive and thought-provoking project.”
About Amanda Beech
Amanda Beech (b. Cheshire, UK, 1972) is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Drawing from popular culture, critical philosophy and real events, her work manifests in different media including critical writing, video installation, drawing, print and sculpture. Using a range of compelling rhetorical and often dogmatic narratives and texts, Beech’s work poses questions and propositions for what a new realist art can be in today’s culture: that is, a work that can articulate a comprehension of reality not restricted to human experience.
About Remai Modern
Remai Modern is a new museum of modern and contemporary art currently coming to life in Saskatoon, a growing city on the vast Canadian Prairies. Opening in 2017, it aims to be a vibrant, imaginative and prescient museum committed to affirming the powerful role that art and artists play in questioning, interpreting and defining the modern era. The building, by eminent Canadian architects KPMB, overlooks the South Saskatchewan River in downtown Saskatoon. Remai Modern is home to the world’s foremost collection of Picasso linocut prints and aspires to be a leading centre for contemporary Indigenous art programming.
For further information, contact:
Sheila Robertson
Communications Manager
Ph +1 306 975-2242
srobertson@remaimodern.org
Remai Modern gratefully acknowledges funding from the City of Saskatoon, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, Canada Council for the Arts and SaskCulture.