The first is the UK premiere of a newly commissioned digital animation work by Motohiko Odani, Odani’s imagination, rooted in academic classicism and cultivated by science fiction, horror movies, comic books and MTV, culminates in works that invoke our primitive senses such as sensuality, movement, speed and fear.
Odani often creates works depicting mutations of human bodies or spaces that evoke alteration/permutation/mutation or hybrid oddities. For example there is a mix of the sweet and disturbing, familiar and unexpected in the video work “Rompers” (also showing), which was one of the works that Odani presented for the Venice Biennale 2003. The video work appears quite innocent at first glance, but very soon reveals more sinister aspects. The picturesque environment of a girl sitting on a tree surrounded by nature has gone weird – possibly by the interference of the genetic engineering – which created frogs with human ears and a yellow-eyed girl with a frog’s tongue. The feeling of a hermetically enclosed environment created in a non-specific time leave us with questions such as why? where? and when is this happening?
The new work “Jackal” will feature solitary and isolated characters experiencing the minimum repetition of physiological needs – appetite, excretion – over again; exploring the tragedy and comedy of a living thing.
The North Pole. 90 degrees North. A point where the spinning of the Earth slows to zero, where every direction points South and the sun rises and sets just one time each year.
“N.” (pronounced NPoint) is a collaborative audio-visual installation by Joe Gilmore (UK) and Andrea Polli (USA) which takes real time online data gathered from research stations in the Arctic to build an audio-visual representation of the altering climate and conditions at the North Pole. According to NASA climate scientists, a dramatic warming trend has been experienced by the Arctic over the last decade that may accelerate global climate change. The N. installation expresses the isolation and environmental extremes of this remote region on top of our planet and the fragility and inter-dependence of our ecosystem.